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| Home-leaving Versus Homecoming: A Study of the Historical Construction of “New Woman” in China and the Interactive Relationship with Female Characters in Hei Ying’s Literary Works |
| Zhang Bingyu1, Khor Boon Eng2 |
1.Faculty of Chinese Studies, University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Kajang 43000, Malaysia
2.Faculty of Chinese Studies, Southern University College, Johor Bahru 81300, Malaysia |
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Abstract In the literary works of the returned overseas Chinese writer Hei Ying, his attentiveness to women’s issues had long been noted by earlier scholars. Yet previous studies have tended to focus either on his affiliation with the so-called “new sensationists” or on the stylistic shift from modernism” to realism in his creative practice. Such scholarship generally approaches the left-leaning trajectory within his oeuvre through a lens of linear progression, without truly returning to the historical milieu of the 1930s Shanghai, where discourses on the construction of “New Woman” were emerging. What is thereby overlooked is the contingent, affectively charged aesthetic orientation that arose from the writer’s own lived emotions. At the same time, although the contrasting tensions—manifested in Hei Ying’s cross-regional experience between China and Nanyang (the South Seas / Southeast Asia)—in shaping the female characters in his works have been proposed, the reification of the concept of “New Woman” in his oeuvre has yet to be examined in depth.In the 1930s Shanghai, discourses on the “New Woman” were multifaceted and mutable. From this perspective, one can discern the interactive relationship between Hei Ying and the historical context. During this period, the construction of the “New Woman” in Shanghai oscillated among urban culture, media representations (often manipulated by political and economic factors), and social ethics, forming a dialectical configuration that reconciled the new-style female’s home-leaving with homecoming. Hei Ying keenly perceived the dialectical configuration and transformed it into the underlying logic guiding his portrayal of female characters, continually using the ups and downs of these female characters in his literary texts to articulate the dialogue between the individual and the collective within the homeland-nation imagination.The dialectical configuration of home-leaving vs. homecoming was instantiated differently across the writer’s early, middle, and late creative phases, revealing distinct chronological variations in its development. Upon Hei Ying’s initial arrival in Shanghai, his close personal acquaintance with Mu Shiying influenced the depiction of “New Woman” characters in his early works, which were shaped mainly by neo-sensationalism and often displayed a seductive, sensually uninhibited urban modernity. Concurrently, he also emulated Mao Dun’s characterization of the “New Woman”, typically fashioning the home-leaving women who, due to the structural constraints of their temporal and spatial context, either swiftly reverted or met with their demise. The year 1934 marked a pivotal turning point in Hei Ying’s style of portraying “New Woman” characters. Disappointments in love, coupled with his regret over the personal and creative decline of his friend Mu Shiying, meant that Mao Dun’s criticism of Hei Ying’s literary style in 1933 and, that same year, Ye Zi’s encouragement to focus more on experiences in Nanyang (which was then under colonial domination) were fully realized in Hei Ying’s texts. Thus, unlike writers native to China, Hei Ying’s cross-regional experience between China and Nanyang endowed the “New Woman” characters in his works with highly individualized aesthetic types. In the middle and later phase of Hei Ying’s oeuvre, the “New Woman” characters he constructs increasingly underscore the twofold perspective and the distinctive qualities of mobility: home-leaving, in Hei Ying’s works, gradually develops into a literary image that establishes a clear intertextual relationship with his political ideals and homeland-nation imagination, while the female characters consequently exhibit more explicit value judgments; correspondingly, homecoming does not focus on a simple return to the “original” home, but rather on the reshaping of identity entangled with cross-regional experiences. In the process of constructing “New Woman” characters in Hei Ying’s literary works, the concepts of home-leaving and homecoming no longer function as a simple binary opposition, but rather operate as a mutually referential paradox. This paradox is employed to articulate the affective folds between diaspora and return among transnational Chinese, as well as to bridge the cultural gaps generated by their cross-regional experiences.To put it in a nutshell, the dialectical configuration of home-leaving vs homecoming operates as a key device by which Hei Ying’s boundary-crossing identity experience is translated into the emergence of the distinctive “New Woman” characters in his literary works. In the same way as the “New Woman” characters shaped by Hei Ying are continually constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed, so too is that Hei Ying’s sense of homeland and nation forged only through repeated cycles of home-leaving and homecoming.
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Received: 17 February 2025
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2026, Vol. 56 
