Individual women

Author: Song Xiaoling
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: This story begins with a recollection of life in one's youth, and at the end of Chapter, we see: "The era when Liu Qiqiao fought against various men officially begins"; it ends just before the start of married life. Clearly, it is still a story of a woman's growth. As a narrative model, the story of a woman's growth has gone through the individualism of the Sha Fei style in Ding Ling's works, the collectivism of the Lin Daojing style in Yang Mo's works, and in the last decade of the last century, it has witnessed a strong subversive writing. Female writers like Lin Bai and Chen Ran released the specters of those who were traumatized by their bodies, imprisoned in their hearts, and suppressed and twisted due to their highly personalized narrative strategies. They provided a quasi-model for Western feminism to resonate and be reinterpreted in China, until younger female writers like Mian Mian continued where Lin Bai and others left off, completely destroying the depth model with what is called "body writing," pursuing the intensity and sharpness of experience itself in the writing of urban subculture and social marginal groups. If we can regard the trajectory of female writing since 1990 as a process of continuously increasing pitch, with a relatively smaller range of notes to explore, then Individual Woman demonstrates an effort to speak more quietly in a broader range. It is simple and unadorned, without guiding ideas or proving any concepts. It simply remains faithful to the portrayal of women, or female life, in ordinary and even mediocre secular life, picking up the faint ripples of the gentle yet melancholic souls within. It even finds vivid and lively, meaningful details or images that can make people pause and reflect in the noisy, chaotic, and seemingly poeticless life. It is fully, but without the extreme experiences spread out like a sharp blade. Where many male and female novelists today are trying to outdo each other in describing intimate moments, it only uses such sentences to pass the time: "Due to some well-known reasons, that night, we were both extremely tired."