Women Writing War Memories: Hayashi Fumiko, Nieh Hualing, and Zhang Ling

In my dissertation, I examine how three female writers, namely, the Japanese writer Hayashi Fumiko and two immigrant writers from China to North America, Nieh Hualing and Zhang Ling, remember and reconstruct memories of war experiences in their works about the Second Sino-Japanese War through the intersection of gendered, transnational, and intergenerational memories. For most of the twentieth century, when women became audible in historical narratives of the war, they usually appear mourning the deaths of their loved ones and are rendered as a trope not of their own suffering but that of the nation’s; they are thus simultaneously silenced and elevated. At the same time, women are also at the core of metaphors that feminize the nation. While narratives of war have been dominated by nationalist, militarist, and masculine discourses, my research transcends this conventional remembrance of war and demonstrates the existence of female subjectivity in transnational spaces through their embodied memories of war, intimacy, sexual violence, and pleasure. By grouping these three writers together, I approach war memories through gendered, transnational, and intergenerational lenses to challenge state-controlled, official narratives of the war and debunk ethnocentric and patriarchal nationalism. My research shows writers’ perpetual entanglement with the legacy of war and their conflicting inclination toward imperialist nostalgia and humanistic cosmopolitanism in various transhistorical and translocal contexts