
Exhibit Website
From Nü to Woman: Female Voices Across the Chinese and American Cultures
by Jieyan Wang, Class of 2025, 3rd Prize, 2022 Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting
My Essay and Bibliography
About
I am a woman writer, and reading other women writers helps me understand my own voice. I am the first one in my family who can collect books. My parents grew up in China in the 1960’s and 1970’s, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a time of intellectual suppression and oppression. Since I cannot take for granted the ability to collect books, I ask myself: “Given the chance to focus on texts, what texts will I choose to illuminate?” Part of the answer is that I want writing that concerns my cultural identity. Additionally, women’s writing, as a whole, is a minority in literature. Women’s writing that concerns both Chinese and American cultures is even rarer. The women’s voices featured in this collection all, in some way, have had an impact on both Chinese and American culture, whether it be through the translation of their works, raising their voices against injustices in history, or speaking to the Chinese-American experience.
Authors of selected books from my collection that are presented below:
Pictured above:
Author images panel 1: Grace Lin • Where the Mountain Meets the Moon Yang Jiang in 1962 • Six Chapters from My Life "Downunder" Chun Ye • Hao • Lantern Puzzle Author images panel 2: Nina Mingya Powles • Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai Li Qingzhao • Complete Collection of Li Qingzhao’s Poetry Author images panel 3: Bing Xin in 1951 • About Women Xue Tao • Brocade River Poems Judy Yung • Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910-1940 • Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America
A Core Book From My Collection
Books Concerning History
The First Book I Collected
Stories of Books in My Life
Literary Journals
Serendipity
Recollection
Collecting is a form of recollection. While Tiny Moons was a difficult book to find, there are books in this collection that have required much more pursuit. In my childhood, I often memorized and recited Classical Chinese poetry. Though, as I grew up, I grew away from this practice and forgot many of the poems I originally memorized. It was only later that I thought to search for these poems again since they encouraged my love of literature in my early years. However, by this time, I did not remember the authors of the poems I recited, and I hardly remembered any lines, only abstract notions of the images mentioned in them. Additionally, the images I remembered, such as birds and mountains, were common images in Classical Chinese poetry, making it difficult to pinpoint any specific poem. While searching for poems from my childhood, I combed through multiple volumes of Classical Chinese poetry, starting with famed poets such as Li Bai and Du Fu. Much of the process of finding these poems involved a kind of subjective “recognition”—a feeling of familiarity when I read a poem, a sense that I had encountered it before. Since I did not remember specific details, I had to rely on this recognition, which often constituted a warm and vague feeling of greeting an old friend.
Two of the books that resulted from this search were the poetry collections of Li Qingzhao and Xue Tao, who are among the few well-known female Classical Chinese poets.
Pictured above:
Image 1: Complete Collection of Li Qingzhao’s Poetry translated by Manfield Zhu, Commerical Press International, Beijing, 2018. Li Qingzhao was a famous Song Dynasty poet. Li Qingzhao’s poetry comes from a longstanding tradition of Classical Chinese poetry that often draws on natural imagery. These images, which come with their own complex sets of connotations and allusions, contribute much to a poem’s meaning. One particular poem I remember from Li Qingzhao is titled “The Partridge Sky” and reads in its first line, “Tears dropping, I heard of the nightingale singing in the tree” (Li 75). Image 2: Brocade River Poems by Xue Tao. Translated and Introduced by Jeanne Larsen, Princeton University Press, 1987, Princeton. Xue Tao was a famous Tang Dynasty poet and is the oldest author in this collection, dating back to the 8th century. This collection gathers poems by Xue that range widely in tone and topic. Classical Chinese works written by women are more difficult to find since women, in old Chinese society, as with many other societies at the time, were traditionally restricted from the public sphere, including the publication of works.
The Meaning of My Collection
It is not enough to say I enjoy book collecting because, in truth, it is a necessity. In texts, I find so much meaning, including the meanings behind my personal identity and the history that has shaped it. I need records of women’s voices not often heard, evidence of the wide-ranging impacts those voices have, testaments that women split between Chinese and American identities do in fact exist and their voices are profound, imaginative, utterly beautiful. I am grateful for the presence of these texts, grateful for the authors’ rich imagination and courage in writing, grateful that I can have this collection.
Gallery of Books & their Authors
Pictured below:
Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao.
Image 1: Chinese edition. Sanmao is the pen name of Chen Maoping, a prominent 20th-century writer. Though this specific edition was published in 2017, Stories of the Sahara itself was first published in 1976. The book is perhaps Sanmao’s best-known work and is a collection of stories from the author’s travels through the Sahara Desert. It is both travelogue and memoir, keenly observing the author’s surroundings and contemplating her internal conflict.
Image 2: Sanmao. Stories of the Sahara. Translated by Mike Fu, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2019. – This translated version of the book includes a foreword by Sharlene Teo, stating, “Sanmao possessed a deep understanding of the self with the granular and cosmic; in her world, connection and isolation, joy and pain, as well as splendor and melancholy existed side by side” (x). Sanmao is an immensely gifted writer, and this English translation of her work is long overdue. I hope in the future, more Chinese women’s writing will be translated into other languages.
Image 3: Sanmao. Photograph from The New Yorker March 31, 2020.