The Dragon's Village

In Yuan-tsung Chen's The Dragon's Village (1980), the coming of age of a young woman, Ling-ling, is paralleled with the struggles that the people of China are going through as their country adopts communism. In the middle of revolution, land reform, and the Korean War, Ling-ling matures and discovers who she is as a woman and a person. Her tale reflects how the role of women in China frequently vacillated between emancipation and oppression during this time in history. Chen uses Ling-ling as well as the other women in her story as an example of what women in China were experiencing during this turbulent time, whether they were old, young, rich, poor, bourgeois, urban, or rural.

To understand how the revolution effected the lives of these women, one should first take a look at Chinese society and communism. Chinese society and culture was uniquely suited to the concept of communism in the one aspect that the good of the group is more important than the good of the individual. In fact, the Communist Party had adapted the family circles usually utilized to discipline a child into criticism/self-criticism sessions for their cell groups (134). However, ancient Chinese culture venerated the elders (specifically those who were male), and the ancestors, while communism was much more egalitarian in its concept of the individual. For example, the Chinese Emperor was seen as the national patriarch, to be revered as if he were a god, or an ancestor, or each person's own father

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Ling-ling's job in Longxiang (85). Ling-ling had had some prior experience with this type of attitude. Growing up in her aunt and uncle's home she had learned the saying, "You listen to the man who feeds you" (4). She and her aunt had often catered to her uncle's desires and one of the reason's that Ling-ling became engaged to Bob Lu was to ensure business ties between the two families (6). Although she was allowed more freedom in Shanghai than the village women were, she understood their centuries old conditioning of submitting to the male figures in their lives. Ling-ling has her first experience with the more stringent attitude towards women when she first arrived in Longxiang. She is discussing village events with two of the village elders and she is spoken to through Cheng, her fellow cadre, but never looked at or spoken to directly (98-99). However, later on, after she has become involved in the lives of the villagers and speaks with these same elders, "I was no longer just a woman or a girl, but a 'cadre,' one of the new neuter gender that the revolution had created" (175). Yet, Ling-ling must still fight for equality, even amongst her peers. When she and Wang Sha are discussing the happenings in the village, the co

Category: Literature - T