Gendering displacement: Nieh Hualing’s re-membering refugee students during the Second Sino-Japanese War

Abstract

This article analyzes the representation of Nieh Hualing’s war memory as a refugee student during the Second Sino-Japanese War in her creative writings, especially Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China, in intertextual conversation with her autobiography, Three Lives. By centering the intersectional experience of a female refugee student, the analysis enriches war narratives with a combination of diasporic and feminist perspectives on daily life distinguishing itself from male-dominated battlefields. While her war experience as a refugee student constitutes her “first life” in war-torn mainland China among her “three lives” in mainland China, Taiwan, and the United States, Nieh as a writer constantly negotiates with her Chineseness and inquires about her positionality in the world when moving across cultures. While Nieh as a writer embodies a “Chinese cosmopolitanism,” the female protagonist in Mulberry and Peach uses “hypersexuality” to reject patriarchal society and ethnocentric nationalism and go beyond Chinese cosmopolitanism.