When I Was in Xia Village
The story was originally published in June 1941 in China's Culture (中国文化, zhōng guó wén huà), a Yan'an journal, which tells the story of a young woman named Zhen Zhen, who was abducted and forced into sexual servitude by the invading Japanese.
[1] She later worked as a spy for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a Japanese army prostitute to collect wartime information.
[1] Written during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the story is generally read as both a national defense narrative and a revelation of the dark side of communist revolutionary experience.
[6] It was further criticized as a blatant example of Ding Ling's own ideological problems and sexual immorality, and she was finally expelled from the Party before being "rehabilitated" in 1978.
[6][7] As a prominent member of the May Fourth generation of writers, Ding Ling's early writing primarily deals with personal liberation and contains elements of Western-style feminism.
[8] With the Chinese society in full crisis, many writers and intellectuals chose to step beyond realistic representation in favor of political statements.
In 1931, she took over as the editor of the communist front journal "Great Dipper" for the League of Left Wing Writers, and secretly joined the CCP in 1932.
[10] Ding Ling began to identify herself as a specific type of writer, and recognized the importance of literature in responding to political crises.
[12] In 1936, Ding Ling escaped from her imprisonment by the Kuomintang (KMT) and arrived in Yan'an, the revolutionary base of the Communist Party.
"[13] "When I Was in Xia Village" was a significant piece of writing, representing Ding Ling's Yan'an work before 1942.
The story simultaneously reflects the author's transformation from self-liberation to expressing revolutionary concerns, and highlights the gaps that existed between her and the Party's ideologies.
[8][13] By drawing on the dark side of Yan'an reality, it questions the various kinds of oppression women had to confront even in the revolutionary community.
After escaping, she was convinced by the Communist Party and was sent back among the enemy as a secret agent to gather military information for the revolutionary army.
[1] She returns to Xia village (which is newly liberated by the CCP) a year later to undergo medical treatment for venereal disease.
While some youths, along with her former lover, appreciate her courage and sacrifice, many villagers of the older generation, including her parents and even a female party member, resent her experience as a shame for women for violating the chastity code.
One partial reading of the story highlights the motif of intellectual learning from the masses, something that the CCP upholds and was later systematically enforced in Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Arts by Mao Zedong.
To some critics, the story is also a reflection of Ding Ling's May Fourth attitude and her feminist message against China's "feudalist" consciousness.
[17] As pointed out by Feng, Ding Ling chose to publish the story after the Party released confirmation of her political allegiance investigation, and two months after she became the editor of the CCP's official newspaper, Liberation Daily.
[17] Zhen Zhen's life experience symbolized Ding Ling's own vision and understanding of national liberation and socialist revolution; while the process is slow and painful, the otherwise marginalized and silenced, in this case, Chinese women, are empowered, and their plight is acknowledged and resolved.
[19] However, Ding Ling also subtly reveals the limited or distant form of support and compassion provided by the CCP to its agents' physical and emotional health.
[19] As a national-defense narrative that is intended to focus on the protagonist's heroism, "When I was in Xia Village" implies rather a contradiction between gender equality and anti-Japanese nationalism.
[22] Barlow explains that Ding Ling was perhaps trying to reverse such "association she found intolerable in Communist Party practice between a woman's political loyalty and her sexual chastity.
During this time, Ding Ling's "Thoughts on March 8", "In the Hospital", and "When I was in Xia Village" received severe political denunciation from some top CCP members and theorists.
[6] While under house arrest from 1933 to 1936 in Nanjing, Ding Ling lived with Feng Da, a man who had betrayed the Party and became a spy for the KMT.
The Party charged Ding Ling for violating female chastity and thus diverging from the Communist ideal of purity.
[34] This characterization also extends to Ding Ling, whose image is now rehabilitated for demonstrating the extraordinary revolutionary responsibility of Communist Party members.
"Women Sex-spies: Chastity, National Dignity, Legitimate Government and Ding Ling's "When I Was in Xia Village"."
