1999 Peking, China

Conference Report:

The First International Conference on Auto/Biography, University of Peking, June 21-24, 1999

Report by Margaretta Jolly (University of Exeter)

Hosted at Peking University, Beijing, this four-day marathon conference in auto/biography brought together a larger number of Chinese and Western auto/biography enthusiasts than have probably ever before met. It was initiated by Zhao Baisheng, who is Director of the Center for World Auto/Biography at Peking University and President of the Chinese Foreign Biography Society, two organizations in China which are pioneering the field here. The cultural exchanges, both academic and personal, made the conference an unforgettable experience, despite the obviously staggering amount of work we Westerners caused to our hosts, as language, money, food, travel, and phoning all required extensive translation and rushing around in the pulsing heat of Beijing in June.

The conference provided a unique opportunity for developing cross-cultural perspectives on Chinese and Western work in the field. Out of 74 papers and 12 plenary presentations, these conclusions can be drawn:

[1] The Chinese papers were much more concerned than the Western ones with the question of authenticity, and the vexed division between historical, fictional and autobiographical genres. Different approaches to the question were evident – ranging from a staunchly conservative assertion by Sang Fengkang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) that ‘Biography Should Be Written as Being True and Real’ to an extremely honed linguistic analysis of how epistemic modality in autobiographical writing serves to enhance the credibility of an account. (Epistemic modality, Li Zhanzi reminded us, is the group of words such as ‘perhaps’, ‘it seemed to me’.) If there was a consensus amongst these different attitudes, it was that Chinese life writing has been too dominated by its historiographical functions in the past, and should much more confidently appropriate the techniques of fiction to create more psychologically orientated accounts.

[2] Many of the Chinese speakers were also concerned to assert that there were strong differences between Chinese and Western life writing practices and traditions. The tradition of biography as the historical records of imperial dynasties has been accompanied by a much more nationalistic, often eulogistic mode, in which biography has flourished as official history but autobiography not much at all. (A fascinating comparison to the nationalist uses of biography was Tel-Aviv University scholar Michael Keren’s paper on Ben-Gurion’s biography and Israeli historiography.) This was interestingly developed in terms of the parallel effects of Taoism and Buddhism, (and implicitly, Communism), that are ‘anti-autobiographical’ in idealising the abandonment or submission of the individual self. Wang Dun (China Ocean Shipping Weekly) offered a comparison between ‘Chinese and Western biographical mentalities’ in terms of the difference between Chinese scroll painting, where figures are subsumed by landscape, and Western historical portraiture, where the individual looms large.

[3] The Western papers seemed more eclectic, although this may have been my own difficulties in understanding the nuances of the Chinese ones, despite heroic efforts to make their work accessible to us through English translations and summaries. (Some of our papers were even more heroically translated into Chinese by a number of visible and invisible students and English lecturers.) Philippe Lejeune gave a witty defense of his assertion that autobiography operates with a ‘truth’ pact that creates a distinctly different writer-reader relationship than that of fiction (whatever the hardline deconstructionists say), a position possibly compatible with much of the Chinese research. He also reminded us that life writing is an everyday means of self-assertion, and one that should be defended in non-academic contexts and terms. This seems to be a stronger issue in France, where diary-writing for example, appears to be seen as a more shameful habit than in Anglo-Saxon countries. Judith Coullie movingly explored auto/biography in the new post-apartheid South Africa. Paul John Eakin’s riveting plenary drew on developmental psychology to argue that early childhood dialogue with caretakers provides the narrative foundations for the construction of identity through time, and ultimately, adult autobiography. Other papers looked at collaborative autobiography, collective biography, disability and life writing, lesbian desire and gender in diaries and letters, Romantic autobiography, agency, Sylvia Plath, feminist biography, women’s narratives of flight (special alert, Amelia Earhart!) and much more.

[4] This greater range than the Chinese papers obviously testifies to the academic institutionalisation of the field in the West, where questions of auto/biographical truth have diversified into studies of the many functions that different genres and disciplines concerned with life story can serve. (It is striking that a significant number of the Chinese academics were working within English and American literature departments.) Nevertheless, two general points might be significant. First, was the emphasis the Westerners put on private and ephemeral forms such as diaries, letters, oral history and autobiographical research processes. Does this represent the greater reach of the Western academy? Or the greater permeation of autobiographical sensibilities throughout Western culture, (more diaries and letters are written, kept, valued)? Or even that a greater range of people consider themselves to be, as well as are being considered to be, writers?

[5] Secondly, Western scholars focused on hybrid as opposed to national identities, particularly those produced through migration (several focusing on Chinese-North American exchanges). Again, we could profitably assess how this reflects the historical fact of China’s relative isolation over the last century, compared to migration flows elsewhere, as against ‘modernist’ versus ‘postmodernist’ notions of identity. Notably, Anand Patil, from Goa University in India spoke of Dalit lower-caste women’s autobiographies in post-colonial terms much more familiar to Western academics in the field.

The conference, cemented through a trip to the Great Wall and a home-brewed karaoke at the farewell Banquet, has produced plans to continue this valuable international dialogue through a list-serve.

(Published in Auto/Biography: A Journal of the British Sociological Association, edited by Andrew Sparkes, University of Exeter.)

Conference Report

Report by Philippe Lejeune (Université de Paris, Nord)

Un jeune universitaire chinois, Zhao Baisheng, qui travaille au départment d’anglais de l’Université de Pékin, se prend de passion pour l’autobiographie – en particulier pour la tradition autobiographique chinoise. Il suffit souvent d’un homme passionné pour créer un movement – quand le terrain est “mûr”. Dans cette Chine qui se remet du choc catastrophique de la Révolution culturelle et cherche sa voie du côté du libéralisme économique, le terrain devait l’être pour une quête d’identité. Zhao Baisheng essaie d’abord de susciter, par une série de rencontres annuelles, l’intérêt de différents collégues pour un sujet jusque-là pratiquement vierge (universitairement parlant) en Chine. Il crée au sein de son Université un “Center for World Auto/Biography”*. Il prend des contacts à l’étranger partout où il peut – essentiellement dans le monde anglo-saxon, qui est son domaine d’étude, et qui se trouve être le mieux structuré pour la communication entre chercheurs. Mais il quête aussi, partout ailleurs dans le monde, des âmes-sœurs. En 1996, il entend parler (comment?) de l’APA et écrit à Ambérieu, nous lui répondons, et voilà le dialogue noué. Je lui suggère de faire à Pékin un petit sondage sur la pratique du journal intime chez les étudiants, il le fait (voir Faute à Rousseau n゜16, octobre 1997, p.65). Pendant ce temps-là prend corps son grand projet, un congrès mondial sur l’auto/biographie à Pékin! Son rêve s’est réalisé: regardez notre “photo de classe”, prise le 21 juin dernier au début du congrès. Nous sommes presque une centaine, une cinquantaine d’universitaires chinois (avec un grand nombre de jeunes doctorants ou post-doctorants), et une quarantaine d’étrangers, venus pour la plupart d’Amérique du Nord (une vingtaine), d’Australie, Nouvelle-Zélande, Afrique du Sud, Inde… Il y a des absences spectaculaires: aucun des pays voisins (Russie, Japon, Corée, Vietnam…) n’est représenté, pas plus que l’Amérique latine ni le monde arabe. Il y a des présences maigrichonnes, l’Europe, pour ne pas la nommer. Pourtant le congrès avait fait l’objet d’une brève dans la Faute à Rousseau…Nous n’avons à nous en prendre qu’à nous: si la communauté autobiographique européenne était mieux structurée, elle saurait faire circuler l’information. Cela m’a donné l’occasion, néanmoins, de faire la connaissance de Margaretta Jolly, notre voisine de Brighton (Mass-Observation Archive), qui du coup est venue la semaine suivante aux Journées d’Ambérieu (on a lu ci-dessus sa présentation de l’encyclopédie elle aussi “mondiale”qu’elle a mise en chantier).

Il est vrai que l’obstacle terrible, à Pékin comme en Europe, est la langue. Le congrès se déroulait en chinois et en anglais, et il n’y avait pas de traduction simultanée. Pour les sessions plénières, un petit résumé était fait dans l’autre langue. Mais le congrès fonctionnait essentiellement en ateliers parallèles, en anglais ou en chinois, sans traduction aucune. C’était le côté supplice de Tantale de ce congrès passionnant. Nous étions venus pour tout apprendre de l’autobiographie chinoise, et nous avons glané nos informations dans les résumés en dix lignes des interventions, et dans les sympathiques conversations au moment des repas.

Voici ce que j’en ai retenu. Il faut distinguer entre la tradition chinoise jusqu’en 1911, et la Chine moderne. L’idée d’autobiographie semble fondamentalement étrangère à la civilization chinoise traditionnelle. Bien sûr, aujourd’hui que l’autobiographie est devenue une valeur (perçue comme importée d’Occident), on peut toujours discerner rétrospectivement des inspirations, des expressions indirectes, etc., et reconstruire une tradition. Je puise mon information essentiellemnt dans la communication de Wang Dun “Notes on different auto/biographical mentalities in China and the West”, qui est catégorique sur l’allergie de la Chine traditionnelle au moi individuel. Mais Zhao Baisheng lui-même, dans son exposé initial, allait dans le même sens, comme le fait que la plupart des communications d’intervenants chinois sur la tradition de leur pays portaient sur la biographie plutôt que sur l’autobiographie. A partir de 1911, tout change, à la fois parce que les modèles occidentaux de l’autobiographie se répandent, et que l’histoire ébranle avec une violence inouie les structures socials traditionnelles, les mentalités et les valeurs, posant à chacun la question de son identité. La plupart des communications sur la Chine du XXe siècle nous semblaient du coup parler de problèmes qui nous étaient hélas trop familiers – toutes les violences de l’histoire, depuis l’autobiographie (en collaboration) du dernier empereur Pu Yi (publiée en 1964 et vendue à 2 millions d’exemplaires) jusqu’aux acteurs (des deux bords) de la Révolution culturelle. -Mais comment juger de la circulation des récits de vie dans la Chine actuelle? Malgré l’accueil chaleureux de nos amis chinois, nous avions le sentiment, faute de connaître la langue, faute de contacts réels qui supposeraient un séjour plus long, de vivre dans une sorte de bulle. J’ai rédigé ce compte rendu parce que, revenant de Chine, il faut bien en parler à ceux qui sont restés ici, mais en sais-je plus qu’eux? – j’en doute.

Le congrès, intitulé “First international conference…”, promettait une suite. Il s’est terminé par une “table ronde” dont le but était de faire le point sur les organizations autobiogrphiques existantes dans le monde (j’ai présenté l’APA et Margaretta Jolly, Mass-Observation – la plupart des autres organizations étaient des revues ou des groupes universitaires), et de poser les foundations d’une association internationale. Une solution d’attente a été retenue: commencer par faire connaissance entre nous par le biais d’une “mailing list” (groupe de discussion par courrier électronique) qui est gérée par Craig Howes (University of Hawai’i, courrier électronique:craighow@hawaii.edu), en attendant que certans d’entre nous (dont Zhao Baisheng) se retrouvent en juillet 2000 à un autre congrès international à Vancouver, Colombie Britannique, Canada ou, pourquoi pas, en Chine de nouveau, à un second congrès international qui se tiendrait à Fuzhou. Espérons que les Européens y seront plus nombreux à venir apprendre à manger le moi avec des baguettes.

*Le mot “auto/biograhpie” avec une barre médiane est d’usage courant dans les milieux universitaire anglo-saxons pour designer l’ensemble biographie + autobiographie.

(Published in La Faute à Rousseau n゜22 – octobre 1999, pp.65-66.)

Conference Report

Report by Tom Smith, Penn State Abington

The 1999 Beijing conference has continued and expanded the efforts to globalize autobiography and biography studies begun by international conferences in the U.S., Germany, and elsewhere over the last fifteen years to globalize autobiography and biography studies among various countries. The conference revealed disparities in the state of those studies. Some scholarly communities are deeply engaged in the investigation of the cultural and political effects of autobiography and biography, while others seem blissfully ignorant of such effects outside their scholarly havens. The majority of speakers and attendees in Beijing were from China and the United States, but there was a strong Australian contingent and participants from Canada, South Africa, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France, Britain, India, and Spain. Speakers from Russia had been expected but were unable to attend. The only area of the world unrepresented was Latin America, and I for one felt the lack of voices from Mexico and farther south. Nonetheless, over the course of the four days of the conference, the variety and vigor of auto/biographical studies in many areas on the planet were well displayed.

One of the best aspects of the conference was the publishing of all the abstracts of papers as planned, if not as presented, in the conference program. Appearing both in English and Chinese, these abstracts obviated the need for every paper to be translated into either language, and they allowed speakers who knew only one language to benefit from attending sessions conducted in the other. To my knowledge, only one English-speaking participant knew Chinese, and many of the Chinese scholars were more fluent reading English than speaking it. During the plenary sessions, each paper was translated into English or Chinese as needed, either in paragraph blocks or in its entirety after being presented. Though these translations shortened the time available for presentations and discussion, they made each plenary presentation accessible in detail to everyone in the audience.

The opening ceremony and three plenary sessions allowed everyone to share common experiences on the first afternoon and the last morning of the three-day conference. The opening session was decidedly ceremonial; an array of dignitaries welcomed us all and invoked the benefits of international cooperation and good will. The speakers were He Fangchuan, Vice-President of Peking University; Philippe Lejeune, the cofounder of the Association for Autobiography (APA) in France; Rebecca Hogan, one of the editors of this journal; Craig Howes, Director of the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawaii; Hu Jialuan, the Dean of the University’s College of Foreign Languages; and Han Zhaoqi, the Honorary President of the Chinese-Foreign Biography Society, who delivered an overview of Chinese biography going back to Sima Qian, born 191 years before Plutarch.

The final plenary speaker of the first session was Judith Lutge Coullie of the University of Durban at Westville in South Africa, who discussed several life stories written since the new government came into power in 1994, including those by Nelson Mandela (Long Walk to Freedom), former head of state F. W. de Klerk (The Last Trek: A New Beginning), Wilfred Cibane (Man of Two Worlds: An Autobiography), Nicky Arden (The Spirit Speaks), Eugene DeKock (A Long Night’s Damage: Working for the Apartheid State), Sarah Penny (The Whiteness of Bones), and James Gregory (Goodbye Bafana: Nelson Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend). These writers, white and black, record a wide variety of responses to the sweeping changes in South African society as it changed from apartheid to a more genuine democracy. Coullie noted that these texts can be categorized as personal memoir narrating a significant life experience, that they all are autobiographical accounts that address historical concerns, and that in all of them, the subject tries to adjust to radically new situations. She discussed the effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which has held out amnesty to those former government officials who come forward to tell their stories and apologize. Failing to do so, as has former Premier Pik Botha, renders one liable to criminal prosecution. In such a climate, confession, autobiographical narration, truthtelling, and apology (in the sense of asking forgiveness rather than self-defense) have become public acts with public consequences. In this situation, autobiography has a public function and a legal force it rarely has in most societies. During the question period, a member of the audience compared the situation in South Africa to that of Australia, where a Royal Commission has been investigating the cases of stolen aboriginal children, who were taken from their families and raised in Western settings in a state-sponsored missionary effort to extirpate aboriginal culture and inculcate Western values in aboriginals. As did not happen in South Africa, however, the Australian Commission published the first-person accounts it received, but did not act legally on them. I found these intersections of autobiography, law, and national history fascinating. While courtrooms everywhere rely on first-person testimony, rarely do the consequences of such testimony range beyond a particular court case. In both Australia and South Africa, autobiographical accounts have been used to uncover not just personal experience but to create a revised and more accurate historical record. In these two countries, autobiography has become a cornerstone of new understandings of historical experience.

The morning of the last day of the conference was devoted also to two plenary sessions and was chaired by Wang Bangwei of Peking University. Joan Doran Hedrick, a historian from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, provided a compelling look into one woman’s life in the American Midwest at the turn of the twentieth century. She placed the memoirs of Mars Whelan (1888-1982), a vaudeville performer and her great aunt, into the racially charged context of lynchings and racial stereotyping. Rather than to excuse or palliate Whelan’s account of her encounters with black men, Hedrick tried to explain it by invoking the powerful myth of the black rapist. Whelan’s memoirs document a feisty, resourceful woman’s experience in a rough and tumble world, now long since vanished. Half a world and over a half a century away from the small-town Midwest American vaudeville circuit, Hedrick made Mars Whelan come alive again.

Alfred Hornung of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat Mainz presented an intriguing paper exploring the connections between autobiography and anthropology. Focusing mainly on Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques and The Savage Mind, Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Hornung considered the nature of these autobiographers’ encounters with other cultures. Interestingly, he briefly described both St. Augustine and the Derrida of the 1991 Circonfessions as North Africans encountering a hegemonic European culture. Also, he considered the topic of anthropology and literature, noting how anthropologists Ruth Benedict, James Clifford, and George E. Marcus, as well as the German philosopher Arnold Gehlen and literary critic Wolfgang Iser, have noted the proximity of anthropology to literary efforts, particularly autobiography. Hornung traced Levi-Strauss’s changing ideas about Brazilian indigenes, Stein’s anthropological attitude toward her native country, and Kingston’s Janus-faced understanding of both Chinese and American cultures. Hornung’s talk provided a framework within autobiography studies that could be used to organize and illuminate the many texts that encode multicultural identity and encounters.

Margaretta Jolly from the University of Sussex gave us an overview of her current project, an Encyclopedia of Life Writing commissioned by Fitzroy Dearborn, a British reference book publisher, and scheduled for publication in 2000. A massive undertaking, the Encyclopedia has a world-wide scope, and for the first time will provide windows for everyone on auto/biographical writing and studies in parts of the world we may now know little about. It was altogether appropriate that at this international conference she preview the book and solicit contributors for the entries not yet assigned. Nowhere else this year, I venture to guess, were there as many scholars of auto/biography from as many different countries gathered in one room. Jolly’s Encyclopedia will be a must, not only for college and university libraries, but for the personal collections of many auto/biography scholars.

The final plenary session, chaired by Eugene Stelzig of SUNY Geneseo, began with a intensely interesting paper by Susanna Egan of the University of British Columbia on Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka, a book by Roy Kiyooka, a Japanese-Canadian poet, based on interviews with his mother, a Japanese emigrant who was the daughter of a Meiji-era samurai. Shuttling back and forth from Western Canada to Japan, Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka was truly bicultural. Her son, however, was unable to understand his mother’s antiquated, turn-of-the-century Japanese and had a friend conduct the interviews. Complicating the book’s authorship still further, Roy Kiyooka died before completing the text, and his family enlisted the help of his former lover, the Anglo-Canadian writer Daphne Marlatt, to complete the work. Egan’s investigations into the composition of the book have revealed much about mother and son. Using the son’s poetry and Marlatt’s other writing, Egan proposes in future work to explore the changing nature of immigrant identity in Canada. She has uncovered a many-layered autobiographical text that, in its complex coming into existence, illustrates what Egan calls the “communal nature of . . . auto/biography.” Mothertalk seems to be an exemplary text for exploring issues of multicultural identity and multiauthor autobiography.

Sang Fengkang, a respected biographer in China and member of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, offered an overview of biographical writing since the Cultural Revolution. His opinion is that biographies and autobiographies since 1979 have more information about recent political figures than did works written before then. Not only are biographies becoming more frequent since the opening up of Chinese society in the 1980s and 1990s, Sang Fengkang believes they are becoming better and less political. There is a greater interest in biography among Chinese readers now. Politicians’ biographies have become popular in the 1990s because they show personal details and virtues that were kept hidden earlier. Unfortunately, Sang Fengkang had to cut short his illuminating talk in the interest of time. Luckily, the program contained the abstract of his talk, in which he argued that “Biography Should Be Written as Being True and Real,” by which he meant that the depictions of “the historical background and the social and cultural settings should be convincing,” and that the biographer should “emphatically portray the biographee’s characteristics” such as “physical features, his inner world, his unique behavior, his linguistics mannerisms, etc.” Literary techniques should be used to create an image of the subject that is “distinctive, well-rounded, and alive.” For Westerners, this appeal for characterization and detail in biography suggests the kind of constraints Chinese biographers have been working under, not only for the last fifty years. In conversations with Chinese scholars at the conference, I gathered that the traditions of official biography and history going back centuries have discouraged the kind of detail and accuracy that Sang Fengkang exhorts his fellow biographers to create. This talk provided an intriguing look into an aspect of Chinese culture to which, I suspect, most Westerners have rarely been exposed.

Paul John Eakin of Indiana University offered a preview of his new book, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Ourselves, published by Cornell in fall 1999. Eakin argued that the origin of the autobiographical self is not only in literature, but in early childhood experience. Following on the work of psychologists such as Jerome Bruner, Ulric Neisser, Katherine Nelson, Robyn Fyvush, and others, he identified a period between ages 3 and 5 when children begin to create “reflexive selves” by telling stories about their experience. Through such narratives, often prompted by parents and other care givers, the child learns to recognize an “extended self,” that is, a self continuing through time to which experiences happen that can be narrated. Eakin illustrated the idea with a wonderfully apt example from Penelope Lively’s autobiography of her childhood, Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived. Lively’s memory of her mental activity while riding in the back seat of the family car in Egypt when she was very young appears to be an instance of the creation of an extended self. Lively named the alternating trees lining the highway as she passed them”jacaranda, oleander, jacaranda, oleander”and as she did so, realized that on the return trip, she would be saying them in reverse. This insight opened up to her the “chasm between past and future, the perpetual slide of the present” and thus made apparent to her a self, also hers, that would be looking back on what was now her present. Her self thus became extended in time; suddenly she developed the ability to look ahead and simultaneously look back imaginatively from the future. That Lively drew her title from the passage Eakin highlighted suggests that the moment was pivotal for Lively both as a child and as an autobiographer. Eakin’s careful reading of that beautiful scene in Lively’s book was deeply sensitive to the child’s perceptions as evoked by the adult narrator. The moment was one to savor, and the next day when all the conference participants, safe and cool in air-conditioned Chinese tourist buses on our way to the Ming Tombs, rode through a shadowy allée of whitewashed river birches bordered by peach orchards shining in the midmorning sun, I realized that Eakin’s talk had provided this extended self with a literary moment to remember with pleasure and appreciation.

The morning’s final paper was presented by David Parker of the Australian National University in Canberra. In a wide-ranging talk that settled down on several of Seamus Heaney’s poems, Parker invoked Ricoeur, Bahktin, Jessica Benjamin, and Emmanuel Levinas to argue for the role of the other in self-construction. He questioned the idea of relational identity as used in autobiography studies, maintaining that it doesn’t account for the differences in people’s relations with others, that it introjects idealized parents, that it may encourage a regressive idea of adult identity, and that it doesn’t account for an understanding of real, not symbolic parents. An understanding of autobiographical identity as empathic, Parker argued, might allow for the imaginative creation of others by the autobiographer. He defined identity formation as a dialogue between self-identification and recognition by others. Heaney’s work provided Parker with several examples. In one, poem number 4 from the sequence “Clearances” in The Haw Lantern, Parker showed how the speaker’s sense of himself is rendered in response to his mother’s deliberate “dumbing down” of her speech in his presence to signal loyalty to her own station in life. Heaney’s speaker joins in, governing his

Tongue

In front of her, a genuinely well-

adjusted adequate betrayal

Of what I knew better.

Heaney’s imitation of his mother, he says, “kept us allied and at bay,” a conclusion that nicely expresses the tension within both interlocutors and between them. Here an empathic identity is shown to be negotiated interpersonally within the poem. Parker’s finely nuanced reading of Heaney demonstrated how attending to the details of texts can complicate critical formulations but also free readers to develop new, more supple ones.

Beyond the plenary sessions, there were 18 panels of four speakers, offered in groups of three concurrent panels. That small number of simultaneous panels ensured that many attendees heard the same papers and could share their experiences later. As at any conference, one cannot hear all the papers one wants to, and from talking with others, I know I missed many excellent papers and sessions. I must mention a few papers I did hear, however.

Xu Dejin of the Luoyang University of Foreign Studies gave an ambitious paper in which he argued that bildungsroman is better understood a special kind of autobiography than as a kind of fiction. Wang Dun, a graduate of Peking University and currently a writer/editor for the China Ocean Shipping Weekly, characterized the differences between Chinese and Western auto/biography as rooted in different relationships to history. He argued that Chinese life writing blends history, individual lives, and art much more so than does Western life writing, which he portrayed as transcending history by means of art to create individuality. He developed an interesting analogy: Western life writing is like a lens, distorting objective reality to create a subjective portrait, whereas Chinese life writing is like a series of mirrors, reflecting reality in a series of scroll paintings from different perspectives in time.

Li Zhanzi of Peking University presented an excellent linguistic analysis of the functions of epistemic modality in helping to create the point of view in autobiography. Discussing phrases like “I knew,” “I thought,” and “it seemed” as they appear in many different autobiographies, Li Zhanzi argued that such phrases contribute to the tension between certainty and uncertainty as well as allow autobiographers both to reveal information about themselves and establish their credibility as narrators. Such expressions invite the reader to adopt the same point of view on the past as the narrator’s. Her paper, derived from her recently completed dissertation, was an impressive piece of work. Patricia E. Connors of the University of Memphis offered an exceedingly well-researched paper on Van Gogh’s reading in literature as documented in his letters, arguing that his conception of art was as influenced by his reading as by other painters’ work. Van Gogh’s letters, it became clear, are a mine of information about the painter’s ideas as well as his life.

Fu Guoying, the indispensable Secretary General of the Conference from Peking University, discussed several writers’ accounts of the Cultural Revolution, dividing them into early and later phases. The earlier writers detail the outrages committed upon them or, if they were politically active during the period, try to exculpate themselves. All these writers blame the “Gang of Four,” as did official China in the years immediately following Mao’s campaign of permanent revolution. Recent writers have tried to be more objective, both about historical events but about their own actions in the period. Fu Guoying singled out Wei Junyi’s Painful Reflections and Dai Houying’s The Character and the Fate: My Stories as examples of the later kind, which she argued are helping to create a reliable historical record of the Cultural Revolution. Perry W. Ma of Peking University also discussed two autobiographies from the Cultural Revolution as well as, surprisingly, Colin Powell’s My American Journey, in support of his thesis, perhaps indebted to Henry Adams’ scientistic theorizing about history, that the “reminiscent value” of an autobiographical work obeys the Newtonian formula F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration). For Ma, the “social position of the author can be considered as the mass, while the fall into the nadir of life can presented by the acceleration over a certain period of time.” Thus, “the faster the change of speed, the greater the impact the writing produces upon the reader.” Such a formula might work well in the case of autobiographies of people whose lives were completely upset in the Cultural Revolution, as Ma showed in the cases of Ji Xianlin’s My Days in Hell (translated into English by Ma and to be published in China in fall 1999) and Yue Daiyun’s To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman (available in English from Univ. of California Press). Ma’s formula also works well for Colin Powell’s account of his rise to prominence from obscurity as the child of a Jamaican immigrant family in New York City, but I wonder how it can explain the impact of autobiographies in which there is no significant change in social status in the writer’s life.

Zhao Baisheng and the committee did a wonderful job of organizing and executing the complex details of the conference. They anticipated well the countless details entailed in hosting about 50 foreigners and an equal number of their compatriots for several days. Much credit must be given to the only Western member of the organizing committee, Constance Post from Iowa State, who has recently spent several years teaching in China. Several young scholars worked around the clock at the hotel to take care of such conference goers’ needs as changing foreign currency into yuan, interpreting our endless requests to the hotel staff, arranging taxis, and serving as tour guides and shepherds during the three days of sightseeing that closed the conference. In particular, Fu Guoying and Wang Dun were unfailingly helpful, always ready to tend immediately to our needs and wishes.

The conference’s sponsors were the Center for World Auto/Biography, the Department of English at Peking University, and the Chinese-Foreign Biography Society. As well as the Ministry of Education, official supporters of the conference were the Peking University Press, and the journal Foreign Languages.

The conference was held in the Da Yuan Hotel, part of a government compound we were told was the Vice-Premier’s residence. Set in a park with gardens and two small lakes, it was built by the aunt of the last emperor just before the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The walled compound was just west of the Old Summer Palace grounds in the Haidian District, about ten miles northwest of the center of Beijing. It bordered a neighborhood of one-story brick houses resembling the farmers’ houses we saw in the countryside. We were told that Beijing had grown up around these farmers’ villages, which were gradually being razed. The inhabitants were being moved to high-rise apartments, which were everywhere around Beijing and stood as bleak reminders of the soulless apartment blocks in former European Communist countries. Our proximity to what looked like the most basic of Chinese living arrangements drove home the point that the participants in the conference, Chinese and Western, were privileged guests, on a par with businesspeople coming to Beijing from all over China for seminars in new management techniques. One such seminar started up in our hotel just as our conference was ending.

On the last day of the conference, all of the Western and some of the Chinese participants toured the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall at Badaling, a short drive northwest of the city. After three days in the hotel, it was good to get out and stretch our legs, especially since the countryside was at the height of its summer beauty. I will leave descriptions of the Tombs and the Great Wall to the guidebooks. They are not to be missed. On our return that night, the conference’s closing banquet was held. Profuse thanks and heartfelt expressions of appreciation were exchanged all around, and Zhao Baisheng then encouraged us, table by table, to come up to the microphone to sing. Being refractory academics, we reinterpreted Zhao’s call; some people sang solos; others sang duets and trios, and many groups sang songs that identified them by country or culture. All the Chinese songs were lost on me, but one from the Peking Opera was beautifully done in that distinctive style strange to Western ears. The standards of musical performance had already been set very high, for two evenings previously, after dinner at the hotel, we had been entertained by four students from China’s version of Juilliard playing traditional Chinese instruments. It was fascinating to hear and see Chinese music in its home setting, relatively free of the encrustations of Western stereotyping.

Loosened by the food and drink of the banquet, we summoned our courage and began to sing. The Australians’ “Waltzing Matilda” was a crowd favorite, as were “Cockles and Mussels” (from a Canadian/English duo), “O Canada” (sung very creditably despite prior apologies and excuses by several Canadians for not knowing the words), “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” “Hava Nagila,” “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (Sidonie Smith and Greg Greco’s favorite), William Andrews’s solo version of James Taylor’s “Carolina on my Mind,” the Connors’ “My Wild Irish Rose,” and John Eakin’s expert imitation of someone like Rudy Vallee. Many other impromptu efforts added to the fun. Kat Langley, from Australia, however, stole the show with her poised and luscious rendition of a Ukranian folk song. The sing along, which reminded several of us of summer camp, dramatized the international aspect of the conference and confirmed, once again, music as the universal language. Washed in worldwide good will and exhausted after our trek to the Great Wall, we bid an official goodbye to the conference.

Thoughtfully, however, the committee had planned two extra days of touring in and around Beijing for those who wished to do some sightseeing. Although our numbers dwindled somewhat over the next two days, many participants took in the sights of China’s capital: The Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Tibetan Buddhist lamasery, and the Summer Palace. Some of the conference’s “accompanying persons” (spouses) had toured several other Beijing sights during the conference. Despite the intense heat and rising humidity, we appreciated the immense scale and magnificence of these monuments of Chinese culture and power.

With Zhao Baisheng’s encouragement, several participants twice met during the conference to make plans to form an International Association for Auto/Biography. The group’s first project has been to create an e-mail discussion list, hosted by the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawaii under the auspices of Craig Howes. This list will facilitate a worldwide discussion of auto/biography, which will help to place all our efforts in a global context (for information on this list, see Announcements below, p. 158). At the July 2000 autobiography conference in Vancouver, the planning group will meet again to chart future activities for the Association. I think I can speak for all who attended the Conference in saying that it was one of the most interesting and inspiring conferences on auto/biography ever to have occurred. Our deep thanks go to our Chinese hosts, who did a truly marvelous job in planning and carrying out the conference. Let us hope that it becomes one of many successful international conferences through which we all widen the horizons of our study of life writing.

Published in a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, Volume 14, No.1, Summer 1999.