Chinese Housewife and Women’s Autobiography

• In Event: Her Life in Her Own Words: Discovering Alternative Voices in Chinese Women’s Writing

Abstract

Flowering Exile (1952) is the first Chinese women’s autobiography in England by a diasporic writer. It is an autobiographical account of a Chinese family that moved to England in the late 1930s and subsequently survived the turbulent war years with three children graduating from Oxford University. The book provides a vivid record of the Chinese diaspora experience in England during that time period.

Dymia Hsiung, the author of the book, was a housewife who stayed at home and took care of the family at the time. She completed the manuscript in Chinese, which was then rendered into English by her husband Shih-I Hsiung, a renowned playwright, novelist, and essayist. My paper will unfold the hardships Dymia endured in dealing with language inadequacy, literary market, and social expectations during the writing and publication of the book. And it will discuss the narrative form and the issue of facticity, especially in relation to the concluding section of the book that contains details overtly contradictory to the historical facts. The paper is to argue that it is through literary representation that this Chinese diasporic writer attempted to negotiate her identity as well as to reconstruct order and peace in a foreign land far away from home.

Author

• Da Zheng, Suffolk University