Alternative Chineseness: War Experience and National Longing in Pan Lei's Red River Trilogy (1952) and Deng Kebao's Alien Lands (1961)

Abstract

Chineseness has been a deeply contested term tackled by several scholars ranging from Tu Weiming’s call for a multilayered “cultural China,” Allen Chun’s provocative “fuck Chineseness”, and Ien Ang’s strategic “On Not Speaking Chinese.” A large number of literary texts have touched upon the notion, especially since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and its subsequent Chinese diaspora. In Taiwan, the bitter aftertaste of war and the excruciating personal experiences have become the central theme of nostalgic anti-Communist literature, the mainstream writing of early postwar Taiwan. Employing a close reading, this paper examines the war experience and national longing in two understudied texts—Pan Lei’s Red River Trilogy (1952) and Deng Kebao’s (Bo Yang’s) Alien Lands (1961). Born in Haiphong of Vietnam to a Chinese father and French-Vietnamese mother, Pan records his personal experience as a soldier torn between his love for the paternal China and maternal Vietnam. Quite the opposite, Deng relies on various veteran soldiers’ accounts to form his Alien Lands, a work documenting the survival of the forgotten Kuomintang force—the Lone Army—on the Burmese side of the Golden Triangle. This paper looks at how the two texts respond to the question of Chineseness respectively. It also redresses the limits of the term—anti-Communist literature, and explores the production and consumption of such literature. It posits that both Pan’s highly personal “hybrid Chineseness” and Deng’s reportage-esque“borderland narrative” complicate the boundaries of China, inviting us to reconsider the issues surrounding identity politics.