ecially the individual so beset by oppressive forces that he or she seems to be mad or going mad. It is also difficult to imagine an experimental and individualistic writer such as Dao reading Mao and not feeling creative claustrophobia akin to the suffering the narrator in "An Artist's Life" undergoes.
Dao's narrator is a person so individualistic that he or she is losing his or her moorings in reality. The message is that the creative individual is under siege by parents, cops, drunkards, hospitals, in short, by all things human and institutional conspiring together to make that artist as crazy as they themselves are.
In much Chinese literature of the post-Mao era, the individual is portrayed as a being embattled by all sorts of forces from both without and within. Many characters are as much restricted by internal voices of oppression as by external voices, for they have internalized social, political and sexual restrictions. This is certainly true of the besieged narrator in "An Artist's Life," and the argument is supported by critical analysis.
As Hsia writes in his introduction to Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919-1949, edited by Lau et al.,
Chinese story writers frequently write of modern intellectuals like themselves, who, while wishing to accomplish something big for their country, soon become aware of their individual smallness and the magnitude of the reactionary forces with which they have to contend" (Lau xvii).
One of the traditional Chinese cultural systems of restriction for the individual is Confucianism. As Hsia writes in Lau et al., before the communists under Mao, the Confucian "gentleman" was the one who ran Chinese society and maintained standards, traditions, restrictions and other obstacles to the expression of the individual. This gentleman in the early days of Mao's rule was mocked by propagandistic writers (Lau xiv).
However, as Smith points out, Confucianism continue
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