Reinterpreting Authorship: Wang Anyi's Essays and Shanghai

Wang Anyi, one of the most industrious and talented post-reform Chinese writers, has emerged from the root-searching author cohort to steal the limelight of Chinese literary world of the past two decades with her continuous, voluminous presentation/representation of Shanghai. While it is widely believed that Wang is down to earth in reflecting and representing the city, to which she has been so empirically related, we should remind ourselves of the fact that such constant reflection and representation of a particular locale is actually a means to fulfill the writer’s insatiable desire of claiming not just ‘authorship,’ but ‘ownership’ of that locale in order to heal and strengthen her wounded, inferior identity. Indeed, in essay form, Wang’s denial of David Der-wei Wang’s categorizing her as one of the disciples of Zhang Ailing, her discussion of the unmatched, close relation between the genre fiction and Shanghai, her encompassing portrayal of the city in the guise of domestic poetics, further attest to our above observation. This paper hopes to direct attention from Wang’s much celebrated fiction to her less discussed essays, and to conceptualize her unremitting attempts in this non-fiction genre, not merely as a narrative construct, but what I shall call a “textual occupation,” a strategic claim to monopolize Shanghai, to dismiss other writers, especially her predecessor Zhang Ailing, as the spokeswoman of this subjectivity which she believes to be exclusively hers.