Writing out of Pain: Body and Self-criticism in Yang Mo’s Diaries

This essay explores the relation between the body and self-criticism (jiantao) in the context of diary writing in modern China. More specifically, it examines articulations of the gendered body in pain and the way they relate to the systematic labor of self-analysis writer Yang Mo (1915-1995) carries out in her diaries (1945-1982). Self-criticism refers to the Communist practice of self-examination that consisted in identifying one’s ideological and/or behavioral shortcomings. Yang Mo’s diaries figure multiple instances of ideological self-analysis that unmistakably reproduce the widely diffused practice of self-accusation and confession that became popular in the Communist years as a means of indoctrination to mold people’s thought. In Yang Mo’s diaries, self-criticism emerges as a dominant interpretive mode through which she examines her thoughts, her life experiences, her role as a mother and wife, her literary career, her commitment to the Party, her relation to the world, and, surprisingly, even her own body. The complicated relation between self-criticism and perceptions of the gendered body in Yang Mo’s diaries opens up a new window into the fascinating and previously unexplored presence of the body in self-criticism within the specific context of diary writing. Yang Mo’s diaries are replete with accounts of physical disabilities and pain. Not only is pain tightly related to her self- and literary creation, but the relation between pain and the fashioning of her identity as a writer mediates and is mediated by Yang’s labor of political self-analysis. Intuitively, the mind is the primary object of scrutiny in self-criticism. Yang Mo’s articulations of pain throughout the diaries, however, not only expose the presence of the body in self-criticism, but also show how the female body in pain and its representations actively interact with self-criticism, and enable mechanisms of self-fashioning and creation that complicate the deconstructive, mind-oriented nature of jiantao.