Speaker: Suzy Kim, Professor of Korean History, Rutgers University
Moderator:Su Yun Kim, Associate Professor, Korean Studies, HKU
Date: Thursday, March 6, 2025 Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
While both feminism and pacifism may appear to have stagnated in the 1950s with the rise of Cold War domesticity and McCarthyism, the Korean War galvanized women to promote women’s rights in the context of the first global peace campaign during the Cold War. Recuperating the erasure of North Korean women from this movement, this talk excavates buried histories of Cold War sutures to show how leftist women tried to bridge the Cold War divide through maternalist strategies. Socialist feminism in the context of a global peace movement facilitated a productive understanding of “difference” toward a transversal politics of solidarity. The talk weaves together the women’s press with photographs and archival film footage to contemplate their use in transnational movements of resistance and solidarity, both then and now.
Suzy Kim is a historian and author of the prize-winning book Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Cornell 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, USA. Her latest book Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell 2023) was completed with the support of the Fulbright Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is senior editor of positions: asia critique, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Korean Studies and Yŏsŏng kwa yŏksa [Women and History], the journal of the Korean Association of Women’s History.
This event is co-organised by the Korean Studies Programme, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, the Women’s Studies Research Centre (WSRC), and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, at the University of Hong Kong.
Since the May Fourth Movement, Ibsen’s “Nora” has become an icon of independent “New Woman”. However, the reception of “Nora” in May Fourth China was intentionally misplaced. Ibsen’s Nora was a wife and mother who ran away from her husband’s home, while the Nora summoned by May Fourth China was a daughter and girlfriend who ran away from her father’s home. Throughout the creation and practice of new literature, there are many expressions of the “New Woman” both inside and outside the literary text, but there is a lack of imagination about the “New Mother”. Including the leading female writers themselves, such as Lu Yin, Xiao Hong, Ding Ling, Lin Huiyin, Eileen Chang, etc., they often rejected or were bothered by their identities and bodies as mothers, sometimes even went to the extent of abortion or abandoning their children.
Lu Xun once pointed out the dilemma of Nora in “What Happens After Nora Running Away”, while Eileen Chang, who seemed indifferent to the May Fourth tradition, subtly echoed Lu Xun’s question of Nora in her works such as “Go! Up to the Tower”, The Fall of the Pagoda, and Little Reunion.
The image of Yvonne Huang, the mother of Eileen Chang, portrayed with a mixture of obsession and hatred in her daughter’s repeated writings, is the most vivid and intricate Chinese “Nora”, a missing yet ambiguous “New Mother” in the history of new literature. This talk will delve into Eileen Chang’s extensive writings about her mother, spanning her early works such as Rumors to later ones such as The Fall of the Pagoda, The Book of Change, Little Reunion, Duizhao Ji, etc.
Yvonne Huang, as delineated by Eileen Chang, is a unique maternal figure in both traditional and modern literature. She has both sides: a “fairy godmother” who represents the first generation of independent and stylish women with refined tastes, traveling around the world and skiing in Switzerland with her “pair of three-inch golden lotus,” choosing to fund her daughter’s education over her son’s. But there is also the side of an “inadequate” mother, harsh and indifferent to her daughter, despising her own maternal identity, and indulging in shocking sexual pleasure. To borrow Eileen Chang’s own words, “the chain breaks”, this signifies a novel mother-daughter relationship amidst the breakdown of the old and new ethics. How can China’s Nora balance her identity as a “New Mother” with her self as a “New Woman”? Can ‘New Women’ also be good mothers? This remains a challenging and real question that confronts all women to this day.
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 林崢，中山大學人文高等研究院副院長、中文系副教授，北京大學學士、博士。曾赴哈佛大學、劍橋大學、柏林洪堡大學、臺灣清華大學等高校訪問。長期致力於城市文化研究、中國現當代文學研究。著有《公園北京：文化生產與文學想像（1860-1937）》（北京大學出版社）。
Zheng LIN holds the position of Vice Deputy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities within Sun Yat-Sen University, while also serving as Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature. She received both her Bachelor’s and PhD degrees from Peking University, and has visited prestigious institutions such as Harvard University, Cambridge University, Humboldt University and National Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on urban cultural studies and modern Chinese literature. In 2022, She published her groundbreaking book Park Beijing: Cultural Production and Literary Imagination (1860-1937) through Peking University Press.
This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series | 張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty & Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)
