Tie Ning - Works

Works

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"Ah, Xiangxue"《哦，香雪》(1982)

This is a story about a pure and pretty country girl, Xiangxue, "fragrant snow" in Chinese. Xiangxue lives in a village in mountains. Every day, a train from the outside of the mountains stops at the village just for a minute. Xiangxue and other country girls take a small basket of eggs to the train when it stops and exchange them for things they because they can't get what they need within the village. Xiangxue carries the basket onto the train, and when she sees a pencil box beside a city girl of her age, she dreams to have it without hesitation. She offers her full basket of eggs for it and receives it. It opens up a door to the outside world for her. The story shows the country girl's simplicity and her yearning for civilization.

"The Village Road Takes Me Home" (1983)

Tie Ning is critical of the masculinity model for grounding subjectivity on opposition to the power of the party/state and assuming responsibility over women's lives. This model is concretized in two male characters who both want to marry the female protagonist because they feel responsible for her earlier marriage to a peasant, which left her a widow and prevented her from returning to the city after the policy of sending educated youths to rural China ended.

In her story of the female protagonist's choice between the two, which entails the significant and ideologically loaded choice between the city and the countryside, Tie Ning reveals the complicity of the masculinity model of subjectivity in the party/state's dominant ideology despite its apparent oppositional stance. In its place, she offers the protagonist's feminine understanding of subjectivity as determining one's life-course based on one's own needs, desires, and abilities rather than with reference to-either in opposition or compliance-the party-state and its ideology.

"How Long is Forever"《永遠有多遠》(1999)

Bai Daxing is a typical girl brought up in Beijing's Hutongs. She is a kind girl who is always willing to offer help to everybody around her without any consideration of her own interests. But the innocent Bai is cheated once and again by the friends who have received her help, and even her whole heart. The people she trusts most are making use of her purity and warm-heartedness, which leaves Bai with less and less… Bai's personality does not seem to be in accordance with the times. Tie uses Bai to emphasize how far a modern society is from forever.

"Da Yu Nv" (Big-Bath Woman) 《大浴女》(2000)

Tie Ning's semi-autobiographical novel, illustrates how difficult it is for Chinese writers to leave aside national allegory. Set in the world of writing and publishing, the novel relates the story of a young woman and two older men who are both in love with her. The narrative alternates between first- and third-person as the protagonist connects her love affair to her memories of her teenage years, showing how she achieves strength through the interweaving of her private and her public lives. In this rich and complex narrative, the author's strong sense of morality (substituting for political consciousness) serves both to sublimate individual desire and also resurrect the collective history of the recent past.