Yang Ch'ien-ho and the Work of Writing Modern Selfhood Satoko ...

Kakihara 2
within modernization, women nonetheless remained imperial subjects who had to resist both
colonialism and patriarchy. Furthermore, the popularized figures of the “Modern Girl” and the
“New Woman” were used by both the state to subjectify women and the women themselves to
resist the gender roles ascribed to them by imperialism and patriarchy. Such resistance by the
women seems to suggest domination of the process of gender construction by the state and a
defiant response by the women thus subjectified through modernization and imperialism.
Yet one way to explore the construction of femininity in the Japanese empire is to turn to
fictional and nonfictional writings published throughout the empire about the imperialization and
modernization of numerous social institutions. By examining such writings, we see that the
construction of gender in the empire was not simply about resistance or a process of stimulus-
response—there was, in fact, a conversation that existed beyond the binary of the
colonizer/colonized, the metropole/territories. In Yang’s descriptions of the modern Taiwanese
woman, she in a way “translates” the ideas of other female writers she reads as a young woman,
such as Japanese feminist writer Ōsako Rinko, to assert the inclusion of Taiwanese ethnicity in
the construction of imperial femininity. I argue that Yang—and other women writers of the
empire—negotiated the notion of modern femininity through iterative and multi-directional
exchanges in the form of writing throughout the metropole and outlying territories.
In her translation of other women writers’ ideas (though not necessarily of language) we
see how Yang explores the social institution of work and labor to establish her modern selfhood,
thereby including herself in the community of modern subjects. Yang’s writings insist on the
relationality of gender construction, balancing the points of her identity on the spectra of
ethnicity and class. She establishes and legitimizes her identity as a middle-class Taiwanese
woman while writing herself into the construction of femininity in the Japanese empire.

Writing As Work: Contradictions of the New Woman
Kakihara 3
For middle-class women in Taiwan, working as a professional and having a career was an
opportunity afforded to them by modernization to construct a new identity and independence.
Yet an ideology similar to the Cult of Domesticity—which in the late 19th century defined the
role of middle- and upper-class white women in the West, particularly the United States, as the
upholder of the nation’s feminine virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity
(Welter 152)—also relegated bourgeois Taiwanese women to the domestic realm as obedient
daughters, good wives, and wise mothers. This ideology deprived bourgeois women of not only
full access to the public realm of non-domestic work but also full control of their private realms
within the patriarchal institution of the family. In the context of colonial modernity under
Japanese rule, middle-class Taiwanese women faced the contradiction of both being oppressed,
female colonial subjects and experiencing the changes of modernization that presented them with
opportunities that challenged practices constructed as traditions.
The potential for a career, however contradictory, nonetheless remained a ticket for
Taiwanese women’s entry into society dominated by male gender and Japanese ethnicity.
Although the oppression of Taiwanese women on account of their ethnicity was clear in
comparison to the social status of Japanese women in Taiwan 2 , Taiwanese women took
advantage of the opportunities to work as professionals, constructing their identities as women of
the empire in the face of discrimination based on both gender and ethnicity.
2 As literary scholar Faye Kleeman says in Under an Imperial Sun, “Personal freedom and physical
comfort are both perquisites of being a colonizer woman” (65).
.

of the New Woman through her writings—said to have more opportunities because of
modernization to establish her identity outside of what was being cast as the traditional
Kakihara 6
institutions of marriage and family—the lived realities for many women in Taiwan differed from
the suppositions based on ideological changes in social institutions brought about by Japanese
modernization efforts. Furthermore, while her fiction describes a world in which modernization
gives more opportunities to women in terms of how to choose to live their lives, her
autobiography and essays continue to value respectable, bourgeois marriage and raising a happy,
bourgeois family rather than embodying the image of the modern, liberated woman who has an
identity based outside of that bourgeois home. There is thus a contradiction in Yang’s
construction of femininity between her fiction and nonfiction, a written and imagined world that
contradicts what she proposes for women’s actual lived realities.
In “translating” ideas from Ōsako’s Girls’ Era, Yang nonetheless asserts a professional
identity in addition to her domestic role as wife and mother. As a professional she writes about
intimacy and women’s issues in her fiction as well as nonfiction, both as active criticism and as a
persistent reminder to ground her writings in her own lived experience. In the story “The Season
When Flowers Bloom,” she discusses the figure of the New Woman as caught in the coming of
modernity and the transition into the Girls’ Era (Yang C., “Hana” 94). The story echoes the
humorous accounts told by Ōsako, who describes her complex emotional reactions to her many
friends’ marriages and motherhood as she herself remains unmarried in order to pursue a career
as a writer (23). Yet we see that, while Yang’s fiction emphasizes the optimistic possibilities laid
out before young, middle-class Taiwanese women of her generation, she also maintains an
adherence to the institutional forces that idealize women’s roles as and for a bourgeois tradition.

Kakihara 7
For women of Yang’s generation, the chance of self-realization was new and posited as
modern. Yet the expectation for most of Yang’s colleagues after graduation from school was still
marriage, rather than a search for what constituted their individual identity. As the character Hui
Ying in “The Season When Flowers Bloom” describes, “for me, personally, the pursuit of
marriage alone was not enough” (Yang C., “Hana” 90). In the parallel universe of the author’s
own life, ever since “opening her eyes” to the joy of writing as a student, Yang had used writing
as an outlet for self-expression, a narrative of a modern self that was separate from the archaic
and pre-modern collective out of which the Taiwanese society was meant to modernize. Yang
did not want to be forced into marriage, in her view a tragic fate of confinement that offered no
excitement or beauty, only boredom and unhappiness (Yang C., Jinsei 94). Instead of marriage
Yang joined the staff of the Taiwan Nichi Nichi Shinpō, wanting to take on the task of proving
her ability to write in Japanese just as well as the other, Japanese writers at the newspaper (Jinsei
123). This step into the professional world as a writer was the inciting incident for Yang to
contribute to the negotiation of femininity and gender roles in the empire. Yet in her attempt to
become a modern individual, Yang constructs a sense of self that is itself an instrument of
imperialism to subjugate her within colonial modernity. The new opportunities made available to
her—of education, work, access to a public sphere—are negotiated in relation to an ethnicized
tradition that is then constructed as backward and regressive. The choice to work as a writer, in
other words, supports the ends of colonial modernity just as much as the choice to marry plays
into the ends of maintaining a traditionally bourgeois, patriarchal heteronormativity.
The subject of Yang’s writings also reinforces her position as a traditional ethnic Other
that needs to be modernized by imperialization, maintaining the contradiction between Yang’s
ideas of opportunities for women and their Taiwanese essence. Hired to write for the women’s

Works Cited
Kakihara 12
Ko, Dorothy, and Wang Zheng. “Introduction: Translating Feminisms in China.” Translating
Feminisms in China: A Special Issue of Gender & History. Eds. Dorothy Ko and Wang
Zheng. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2007. 1–12. Print.
Lin, Hermia. “Confronting colonialism: Taiwan literature under Japanese colonial rule.” Taiwan
Cultural Portal. Culture Taiwan, 24 Sep. 2009. Web. 26 Oct. 2009
.
Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.” American Quarterly 18 (1966):
151–174. Print.
Wu Yulin. “No Shame in the Game of Love: On Killing Husband and Osmanthus Alley.” M.A.
thesis. National Central University, 1997. Print.
Yang Ch’ien-ho. “Hana Saku Kisetsu.” Trans. Janice Brown. Taiwan Literature: English
Translation Series 11 (2002): 87–104. Print.
---. Jinsei no Purizumu. Tokyo, Japan: Soubunsha, 1993. Print.