Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter, or “When” Does a “Chinese” Woman Become a “Feminist”?

In the spring of 1988, I found myself sitting next to Zhang Jie, perhaps the most prominent woman writer in China at the time, at a reception in Beijing for American writers hosted by the Chinese Ministry of Culture. As the interpreter/translator for the American delegation, I had acquired the derivative power of proximity to prominent American and Chinese writers to enjoy a sumptuous banquet and to serve as the intermediary of conversation and cultural exchange. One of the questions that was frequently raised by the American delegation, especially by women writers during that reception and later during meetings in Beijing, Chengdu, and Shanghai, was whether Chinese women writers were keen on expressing feminist intent and exposing female oppression. Upon hearing the question thus posed and translated in my Taiwanese-inflected terminology, Zhang Jie appeared to be ill at ease. Despite the fact that she was then the most acclaimed writer of female sensibility, she replied after a short pause that there was no such thing as “feminism” (nuxing zhuyi or nuquanzbuyi) in China and that she would not call herself a “feminist” or a “feminist writer.” This was my first trip to China as a Korean-born, Taiwan- and U.S.-educated ethnic Chinese residing in California, and, out of sheer ignorance, I understood her categorical rejection to be the expression of her care to avoid making any anti-official statements at a state-sponsored event.