Classifying Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 as a realistic novel of manners, some modern critics fault its author for failing to maintain a consistently realist approach. This paper argues that the author was not careless or inadvertently “inconsistent,” but instead chose to alternate the “realist” approach with satiric and ironic modes in the novel, creating rhythmic changes in tone and mood for aesthetic effect. The novel can be fruitfully analyzed as a complex satire of manners, or a satire on society of that period, but not as a personal lampoon, a strictly political satire, or a simplistic, Class-based proto-Marxist satire. It lends itself to Bakhtinian polyphonic analysis, for it is intended to be read simultaneously at several levels. I examine the novel's satiric characteristics, the semantic range of its title and the authorial pseudonym, and the problem of interpreting some of the novel's “inconsistencies.” I argue that while the novel encourages multi- ple interpretations, these interpretations are not indeterminate, indefinite, or endless, nor do they cancel one another out. I suggest that the controversial ending of Jin Ping Mei be read as relatively positive because it implies forgiveness, restoration of peace, regeneration, and growth.

This essay begins with a summary of the teaching of Asian American literature in the U.S. and the continued neglect of poetry. Then the relationship of Chinese American identity to the concept of “Asian American” is explored along with the changing political and social conditions that have contributed to the increasing diversification of Asian American poetry. Then historical background on the rapidly growing Chinese American population is provided. The essay presents the argument that because previous generations focused on issues of heritage, identity, discrimination, immigrant alienation, family continuity, and language, Chinese American poets today may feel a greater sense of freedom in addressing whatever themes or topics appeal to their drive for poetic expression. That argument is followed by a reading of several individual poets, grouped into three categories: pan-Asian politics, immigrant authors, and Hawai’ian Islands’ Chinese Americans, plus consideration of a poet whose mixed ethnicity complicates the very categories established here. Fay Chiang and Nellie Wong are treated in the first category; Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Li-Young Lee, and Marilyn Chin in the second one; Eric Chock and Wing Tek Lum in the third category; and Cathy Song is treated as the mixed ethnicity example. The essay concludes with the argument that for many Chinese American poets there is a living heritage and a cultural continuity through growth and reinvigoration and a hope in the possibility of cultural inclusiveness based on combining multigenerational and multiethnic experience.

This paper focuses on the “reader” factor, one among various others, which contributes to a meaningful reading of martial arts fiction, either in its original or in English translation. A cultural item, a yellow knapsack, is drawn from Jin Yong’s Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain, to exemplify this point. The five excerpts presented in the paper, in their order of appearance in the story, will serve to illustrate how informed readers with assumed knowledge will derive something quite different from reading these excerpts concerning an article called a yellow knapsack, or huang bao fu in the original text, owned by the Gilt-faced Buddha, known also as Phoenix the Knight-errant, alias the Invincible Under the Sky. Thus, seasoned readers will be able to delve into another side of Phoenix’s character in the story. Readers are expected to contribute their implicit cultural knowledge, if not their intellect to bridging the missing links in the story, thereby wringing a coherent whole out of the martial arts novel.

The paper argues that a translation comes about as the result of a complex process of decision-making which may be interfered by texts other than the original. A translated text is, as it were, a locus of manipulative efforts which sheds light on the translator's hidden agenda. Liang Tsung-tai’s translation of Baudelaire’s “Bénédiction” and “Correspondances’ is illustrative. The two translated poems, plagued by deviations and unequivalence, “correspond” with Liang’s version of “French Symbolism.” But ironically, the “symbolist poetics” in question derives from Leibniz, Goethe, Dante, Chuang Tzu 莊子, T'ao Yüan-ming 陶淵明. The main interest of the paper is to show how different literary and philosophical discourses penetrate into the translated texts to replace Baudelaire’s poetics. The last part of the paper further situates Liang’s “French Symbolism” in his discourse on Modern Chinese Poetry, only to discover that “French Symbolism” is synonymous with “pure poetry” advocated by Paul Valéry—the kind of poetry Liang wanted to popularize in Peking in the 1930s.

Colonialism was and is a worldwide phenomenon, producing changes which are reflected in national literature. To countries threatened with imperial domination, cultural definition becomes a paramount concern. In studying early twentieth century texts from Taiwan, a region occupied and colonized by the Japanese from 1895 to 1945, readers may discover striking similarities with the literature of British-dominated Quebec. Facing difficulties ranging from the imposition of a foreign legal system to enforced bi-lingualism, both Quebec and Taiwan keenly felt the influence of a foreign colonizing power thrust upon them. A brief comparison of the short story “The Doctor’s Mother,” by Wu Cho-liu, and the novel Kamouraska by Anne Hebert, can shed light on the sense of loss and alienation experienced by peoples under foreign domination. Exploring these two texts in which colonialism plays a dominant role, and investigating them in tandem, will illuminate some universal as well as some nationally specific social concerns, thereby promoting a greater understanding of colonized society and its literary expression.

This essay compares Ding Ling's “Miss Sophie's Diary” and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, both of which tell about female quest for self. Examining the two fictions through the lens of the cultural mode of feminist criticism proposed by Elaine Showalter in her article “Feminist Criticism in the Wildness,” the essay “deconstructs” the feminine discourses of the two heroines, calling into question the “purity” of their feminine voices. Following the trajectory of their searches for self, it compares their sense of self, their relationship with the community and with men and explores how they undergo parallel experiences grounded in their conflicted status (Westernized vs. traditional Chinese, and African-American), how their self is socially, historically, culturally, and/or racially constructed, how a modern Chinese woman’s sense of self is similar to as well as different from that of a black American woman, and how their discourses manifest a double-voicedness, undercutting and are, at the same time, undercut by the two specific dominant cultures, both of which are patriarchal in essence.