Being Subjugated and Becoming Enlightened: Female Workers in and Implications of Chan Yingzhen’s Washington Building Series

Abstract

<p>Washington Building Series contains four stories written by Taiwanese novelist Chen Yingzhen (1937-2016) after he completed a seven-year (1968-1975) prison sentence due to his leftist ideology. The sentence that “Going to work is a big scam” in “A Day for Office Workers,” one of the constituent stories of the series, powerfully encapsulates the nearly irrefragable labour-management relationship in the Marxist sense of economic production. While the series’ general theme—the alienation and subjugation of Taiwanese working people—has attracted scholarly attention, this two-part paper zooms in on the gender aspect and positions the series in a larger context of Taiwan’s Nativist Literary Debate that took place in 1977 and 1978 so as to explore the implications of the series. Employing close reading, the first part discusses the two different female images in the series. More specifically, in “Mountain Path,” the heroine Linda symbolizes Taiwan’s status of being exploited and the Taiwanese-Mainlander ethnic harmony. As for the blue-collar female worker Xiaowen in “Cloud,” her diary-keeping epitomizes the insight into the unfair structure and contrasts her male counterpart’s loss of idealism. Hence, it denotes Taiwan’s nascent proletarian subjectivity. The second part historicizes the series against the backdrop of the Debate. It posits that while Chen’s works often risk prioritizing his socialist ideology, the series can be seen as a pioneering paradigm of Taiwanese workers’ literature. And the series matters precisely because of its profound class reflection, a dimension that overall remains quite indistinct in contemporary Taiwanese literature and literary historiography.<br></p>