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After Patricide: Between Giving Up the Search and Searching Again—On Zhang Chengzhi's Rivers of the North

Ivan Yi-fan Hu · 2023.5.11–14

Written in 2023, this early essay was one of my first attempts at literary criticism.

Whenever Zhang Chengzhi enters public discussion, talk of his works is accompanied by fascination with his life. Zhang the "inventor of the Red Guards" and the figure associated with "Chinese Islamic fundamentalism" attracts more attention than Zhang the writer. Such interest undeniably involves misrecognition and voyeurism, yet it also offers coordinates for reading his work and assessing his literary-historical position. The memories of educated youth and rural placement that recur in his early writing, and the intense religious feeling that erupts in his later work, form intriguing intertexts with these labels. When "the revolutionary convictions pursued for fifty years by the Red Guards of Tsinghua University High School" become entangled with "the spirit upheld by the Jahriyya for two centuries"1, how should we enter Zhang's literary or spiritual world? A literary-historical account of his career seems possible, but risks beginning with a predetermined answer and reading backwards. Better to enter a work directly and let Zhang speak through the spaces and openings his words construct.

This is why I choose Rivers of the North. The experiences of its protagonist, a Beijing educated youth called "he"—participating in the Red Guards, going to the frontier countryside, applying for postgraduate study—carry autobiographical overtones. The shifting pronouns "he" and "you," together with the psychological narration throughout, suggest someone contemplating his soul and trying to speak with it. The novella retains the youthful exuberance and rugged gravity of earlier works such as Black Steed, while bringing questions associated with subsequent root-seeking literature to his familiar frontier writing. Its ambiguous position between educated-youth literature and root-seeking literature2 makes it an apt text for examining how their shared theme of reconstructing community rises from the collapse of faith and spiritual healing of one generation to the nation-state as a whole: "a process through which a person discovers and understands the proper relation between the individual self and the national greater self ... an essential process of construction"3. Zhang's temperament as the "lone rider and holy warrior of the grasslands"4 appears in his "lyrical, cathartic expression of an unrelenting commitment to ideals", and his "insistence on finding their radiance amid harsh reality"5. Beyond its powerful appeal to young readers, it intimates "a desire within his own flesh": "his pen is not writing but painting vivid pictures and conducting ecstatic songs"6. This desire without a fixed object must nonetheless find a concrete object as an attainable reality to which it can speak. Spiritual longing couples with congenial resources in the world; in struggles, pursuits, and even sacrifices undertaken in devoted allegiance to them, the individual's original impulse and the sublime object of that impulse come fully into bloom together.

This may itself be a misrecognition of the "imagined community" kind. When its concrete object encounters a reality that the individual spirit cannot resist, the object collapses and is rebuilt, while the once-exalted longing acquires shades of melancholy and agitation. Yet these seem limited to the interval between community's collapse and reconstruction. Moreover, repeated upheavals make the object increasingly internal and concealed. The object supporting spiritual longing moves out of reality and into the spirit, coupling more closely with the subject, until it becomes part of the subject's own interiority. From the proclamations and big-character posters of a young Red Guard at Tsinghua University High School, animated by a still-indistinct enthusiasm for proletarian revolution, through the post-Cultural Revolution celebration of mountains and plains embracing a grand "China" of "a bloodline, a land, a creative force"7, to the turn towards Jahriyya and its sacrificial path—"giving oneself for God, seeking death rather than life"—as "a foreign Islamic order gradually becoming an essence of Chinese culture"8, we witness Zhang's inexhaustible pursuit of a sublime spiritual object. Driven by "a desire within his own flesh," this pursuit is structurally akin to, yet heterogeneous with, the upheavals in Chinese inner life after the Cultural Revolution. It connects the transition from educated-youth literature to root-seeking literature.

As noted, Rivers of the North stands between these two formations. This literary-historical placement is hindsight, but the experience of reading the novella suggests that it shares a generation's anxiety about justifying itself and its uncertainty before reality, while seeking to rise from the recollections of one cohort, bound to state and social politics, towards a nation-state shared by and sustaining "the Chinese." This first appears in a passage before the story proper:

I believe a just and profound understanding will one day sum things up for us; only then will the struggle, thinking, marks, and choices peculiar to our generation reveal their meaning. But then we shall regret our former childishness, mistakes, and limitations, and feel all the more keenly that we cannot live our lives again. This is a deep foundation for pessimism. Yet for a country so vast and so ancient, the future is ultimately bright. Within this maternal body, a bloodline, a soil, and a creative force will bring vigorous, healthy newborns into the world, and their joyful cries will drown the sickly, feeble groans. From this perspective, everything should again be optimistic. (p. 1)

Even if "a just and profound understanding" eases or dissolves the anxiety of "our generation" about proving its meaning, individual spiritual instability leaves "a deep basis for pessimism". "Yet" "everything ought to be optimistic"! Why? A myth of the maternal body bears Zhang's frustration at the force—"the desire within his flesh"—that longs to erupt but cannot. Joyful cries replace sickly groans, healthy infants replace wounded and exhausted old bodies, on condition that one curls up within the mother, "a vast country with a long history". Only then can his persistent question of meaning be answered. But what was "that promised just and profound understanding"? The passage forms an apparently self-consistent circular argument. A sublime object is first expected to "sum up our lives"; residual pessimism caused by spiritual uncertainty must then be resolved by appealing to that object once more. Yet was attachment to it not initially motivated by the individual's own spiritual anxiety—a "desire within his own flesh"? Why does repeated consultation with the object reduce individual inner life to something barely worth speaking about? If "root-seeking means not only tracing cultural history but examining the twists of humanity and life"9, why does the root itself become the subject to which the human being attaches and submits? Why does the subject fail to recognize this subordination, instead transcending the past to sing spiritual hymns? Or has the subject fused with the sublime object in the act of worship?

We must return to the wounds awaiting healing immediately after the Cultural Revolution. "It was precisely within the intensely serious, tragic atmosphere and feelings permeating victims' consciousness that post-Cultural Revolution Chinese literature began."10 In "The Class Teacher," Teacher Zhang's near-tearful condemnation of "the Gang of Four, that gang of vermin who brought disaster upon the country and the people," contrasts with his weak, sparse, sighing questions about himself and "the situation in which dark clouds pressed down from above". In "The Wound," Xiaohua's cry to her dead mother, "I shall never forget who inflicted the wounds on your heart and mine," is followed, paradoxically, by the pledge: "I shall never forget Chairman Hua's kindness. I shall follow the Party Central Committee headed by Chairman Hua and devote all my strength to the Party's cause." These reveal a mentality of "tirelessly continuing to search for the great mother who has vanished somewhere. The great mother once thought to guide and protect was not truly a mother. Nevertheless—no, precisely because of that—one wants to find the real mother again." Did what followed genuinely become an "age of losing the mother," in which "writers each sought a position from which to live without her"?11

Zhang's novella may indeed have "launched a vigorous assault on our literary enterprise with several surging rivers". But did it announce "a new posture on entering a wholly new historical era, a new happiness and solemnity, a new breadth of mind, and a higher foundation of cultural intelligence"?12 This question can be considered with the preceding one. The novella interestingly replaces the maternal metaphor with a father implying greater allegiance or conversion to a sublime spiritual object. Indeed, it tells how "he" seeks and answers the father through river pilgrimages, postgraduate examinations, and poetry. This father differs from the concrete yet distant mother grounded in confidence in and worship of political leaders, familiar from scar literature and earlier writing. He is an abstract yet perceptible father symbolized by rivers, the nation's backbone and spiritual bloodline. Larger and more expansive than the mother, he nonetheless couples with the subject in a more personal and emotional way:

Tell me everything, Yellow River, so I can write it all on that examination paper and leave those old markers dumbfounded. It will not be an examination paper but a song, a poem, an eternal music of father and son. Could those old men's examination papers really contain it? he asked himself. Impossible, he answered. This is a secret that cannot be written and should not be told to others. You were so foolish, he mocked himself; you have forgotten whether there was any revelation or special feeling when you crossed the Yellow River. (p. 17)

"Secret" and "revelation" name the decisive difference between this paternal object and the earlier mother. It projects into reality from a position above it, incorporating the subject through a more abstract and therefore more interpretively open form. At once more sublime and more deeply embedded, it becomes the subject's spiritual ground. Because this object chooses concrete things rather than depending on them, worldly events can scarcely shake or overturn it at its roots. At most, a temporary wavering of the chosen object dims it before a suitable substitute restores its vitality. It therefore overlaps almost perfectly with "the desire within the flesh" that originally prompted its pursuit. The subject can no longer distinguish being driven by personal longing from being driven by the object. This is particularly true of the national community Zhang celebrates through the hot-blooded youth's crossing of the Yellow River. That community depends on an encompassing imagination of national spirit or character, which addresses the subject like a sacred father in a sublime yet private call. Inevitably this spiritual call diffuses into reality or is projected there by the subject.

Reconsidering the literary-historical distinction between an "age of the mother" and an "age of losing the mother" reveals the absence of the father, a metaphor that certainly existed and continues today. Perhaps it escaped notice because of its concealed form, or because its sublimity had become an unquestioned premise. We might instead call the latter period an "age of the father." Even where "writers sought their own footholds after losing the mother", did her loss usher in a father of "shared, unquestioned, intense spiritual superiority"?13 The diffusion or projection just described erupts in an inward speech charged with patricide:

"Ever since I was little … I had no father. For years I had forgotten all about any father. That man abandoned my mother—that bastard. … For years I have wanted to grow into a big, strong man. Then I would find him and, before his wife and children, beat his face hard." … Since childhood I had never known how to say that disgusting word "Dad," nor thought I ought to have a father. (p. 16)

If this were merely abuse directed at an irresponsible biological father, it would be an ordinary hatred born of hurt and grievance. Its counterpart—"But I have a great mother," and "With her, I have everything I need in life"—comes from the same source. These concrete likes and dislikes connect with the age of the mother. The father he curses is thus a metaphor for a false, unreliable mother; praising his great mother shares the motive of "searching again for a true mother", a concrete spiritual support in reality. In brief, he kills the father in the maternal sense and secretly vows never to seek that father again. Yet this maternal-sense patricide leads to recognizing the river as a father in the paternal sense, a sublime spiritual object:

With trembling fingers he struck a match and lit a cigarette. Yet today you suddenly discover that you should still have a father, and that you have already found one. He breathed out smoke. Ah, what a good day: today you have found your father—the Yellow River. Silently he thought this and sank into his own emotion. (p. 16)

"Father Yellow River": he appropriates the river long figured as the mother river, couples it with his enduring spiritual impulse, and devotes himself to the fervour of being its son. His actions acquire an almost religious-hermeneutic elevation. The impulse to swim across: "This is my Father Yellow River calling me" (p. 21). His reflection on his successful earlier crossing: "The Yellow River is your father, secretly protecting his little son" (p. 18); "You crossed successfully thanks to Father Yellow River's protection and tolerance" (p. 22). His experience of repeating the crossing years later: "Father Yellow River has protected me once again" (p. 23); "Father Yellow River, I am grateful to you" (p. 24). Here "she" effectively symbolizes "him" after losing a maternal-sense father but before finding a paternal-sense father. Her exhausted, melancholy, trembling recollection of her father's death at Red Guard hands contrasts with his teeth-gritting fury. His inward promises, "I am willing to take responsibility for you" and "I should be gentler with her," echo his declaration, "Today I am no longer that shallow little duckling": finding the father seems to let him save himself and then others. Her thought, "Oh no, I seem to have fallen in love with him," and "the tense lines of her smile" while photographing his crossing, suggest that his robust stature fills the vacancy left by her murdered father. Yet this has not risen to a spiritual level: in Zhang's prefatory terms, "a deep basis for pessimism" remains. Her subsequent vacillation between Xu Huabei and him, and her sigh, "Ah, you are both good people," show that she still inhabits a maternal age requiring another person. He, meanwhile, has received the father's sublime call: "In the end, all this is different for me" (p. 81).

Perhaps, in the end, "the twelve-year-old girl has found her rock, Huabei has found his victory, and you have found your rivers of the north. We have all found what we were pursuing" (p. 93). Yet their deeper spiritual differences remain. The girl who saw her father beaten to death at twelve still seeks "a rock, an ideal support" (p. 89), to fill the mother's absence. Xu Huabei, raging against injustice, uses "teeth that bite" (p. 61) to kill the mother he once trusted and who abandoned him; art may be the father he finds "to leap out of the pit" (p. 67). Having founded his sublime paternal faith upon the northern rivers, "he" still encounters an unfamiliar environment "beyond those rivers' command" that "forcefully negates his thinking" (p. 68). But whether one kills or endlessly seeks the mother, converts to or passionately believes in the father, these are not merely a generation's spiritual experiences. They are the unavoidable joys and sorrows of countless people entering youth now or in the future. "He vaguely senses that he has made quite a few errors, gone to extremes, and lost his sense of proportion, yet he also feels that all this was utterly unavoidable" (p. 95). In the final torrents after the Heilongjiang thaws, and in Nobuyasu Okabayashi's low, hoarse singing, Zhang's longing continues its wild dance, while everything seems to dissolve into the dawn of tomorrow, a new world:

The depth of your pain

I cannot, of course, understand.

Why have we grown so distant,

when we have always been right here?

Yes, I am myself;

I cannot become you.

Even as you struggle alone over there,

I can only watch in silence.

Both of us are being tested,

but who, after all, are you to me?

If everything is to fall apart from here,

then who was I ever to you?

…

Notes

  1. Xu Zidong, Rereading Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction, vol. II (Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 2021), 346.
  2. Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2010), 342.
  3. Li Yang, Modernity in the Writing of Literary History (Taiyuan: Shaanxi Education Press, 2006), 120.
  4. Zhang Chengzhi, 'The Lone Rider and Holy Warrior of the Grasslands', in Leung Lai-fong, From Red Guards to Writers (Taipei: Wan Hsiang, 1993), 190.
  5. Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, 347.
  6. Zhang Chengzhi, 'Author's Preface', in Poems of Revelation (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1990).
  7. Zhang Chengzhi, 'Rivers of the North', in Rivers of the North (Beijing: Writers Publishing House, 2000), 1. Subsequent references give page numbers in the text without repeating the full citation.
  8. Zhang Chengzhi, A History of the Soul (Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House, 1991), 287.
  9. David Der-wei Wang, 'My Land and My People: On Li Rui's Blue Stone Ravine', in Reading Contemporary Fiction: Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Overseas (Taipei: Yuan-Liou, 1991), 148.
  10. Naoko Kondo, A Landscape with Wolves: Reading Chinese Literature of the 1980s, trans. Liao Jinqiu (People's Literature Publishing House, 2001), 64.
  11. Naoko Kondo, A Landscape with Wolves: Reading Chinese Literature of the 1980s, 69–70.
  12. Wang Meng, 'In Praise of Earth and Youth: On Rivers of the North', Literature and Art News, no. 3 (1984).
  13. Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, trans. Gong Weibin and Liang Jingyu (Beijing: Central Compilation and Translation Press, 2002), 116.

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