(Post-)traumatic Logic of Socialism, Hunger, and Masculinity in Zhang Xianliang’s Mimosa (1984)

Zhang Xianliang was officially stigmatized as a rightist in the Anti-Rightist Movement because of his published long poem “The Song of Hurricane” (1957) and then expelled to Xihu Farm in Yinchuan for nineteen years. After Mao Zedong died in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping relaxed the freedom of artistic creation in the Fourth Congress of Chinese Art Workers on October 30, 1979, many older-generation Chinese intellectuals, including Zhang, were rehabilitated and then resumed writing, collectively reiterating their shared experiences of political mistreatment, hunger, boredom, insufferable labor, family separation, repressed romantic desires, and so on through fictional creation. Their reiteration encodes a powerful reevaluation of Mao’s history in an era of ideological transition.

This chapter focuses on Zhang Xianliang’s reflective novella Mimosa (1984), which epitomizes the anti-intellectual history of Mao’s China with its fictional record of personal experiences in early Deng’s era. Food is a key to accessing the intersection of post-traumatic memories and reimagined gender politics that marked the specific ambivalence of Zhang. An illustration of the representation of food, as a pivotal signifier to determine the power relation between two protagonists during a famine, supports my argument that the narrative responses to hunger could modify masculinity and empower women beyond socialist regulations and patriarchal conventions....