Gendered Cites, Gendered Histories: A Comparison of Hong Kong Trilogy and Reality and Fiction.
With the second millennium approaching, the last decade of the twentieth century witnesses numerous efforts, in the east and in the west, to write in reflection of the past. Despite the fact that the millennial phenomena are based on Christian belief and the east is not so much carried away by such religious zeal, wide circulation of information and rapid exchange of values on a global scale contribute to the shared sensations of both fear and hope in anticipation of the year 2000. Against such socio-historical background as embodied in the Y2K crisis, Chinese literature also sees writings that attempt to reconstruct history in fictional form, to represent Chinese history in an alternative fashion “near the end of time.” Both Wang Anyi’s Reality and Fiction and Shi Shuqing’s Hong Kong Trilogy register the cultural mentality. They both recruit women as representatives of the cities, who experience and witness the changes and transformation undergoing in the cities through turbulent times. Along with their life stories, the histories of Shanghai and Hong Kong, which further symbolize Chinese history from the 1950s to 1980s and history of Hong Kong from 1942 to the 1970’s, respectively, is unrolled. The paper will analyze the dynamics between women, places, and history the two writers intend to lay out in their writing, the histories of “the marginal other” both writers inscribe in their characterizations of the two female characters, and the “prophesies” they share and deliver in their novels in view of the consequences of late capitalism while mapping out the past of the two cities.
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