Ying Ge’s Why Go Abroad: A Report from the Other Side of the Ocean focuses on three Chinese men and two Chinese women. Lu Dapeng, previously a Beijing-based government official, comes to Australia because he becomes tired of his routine office work. Li Mengfei is a self-employed businessman, who does not have much schooling and was jailed for two years for his involvement in street fighting. Jiang Xiaofan was born into a family of scholars and has obtained a Master’s degree from a prestigious university in China. Lin Yun is a physician whose father is a retired high-ranking army officer. She migrates to Australia to heal a broken heart after her husband leaves her for another woman. Chen Xiaoyi joins the large influx of students to Australia shortly after she graduates from university. The three men and Lin Yun get to know each other at Melbourne airport after disembarking from the same flight. Faced with the same difficulty of finding an anchor in an alien land, they decide to take a flat and live
together. Li Mengfei comes across Chen Xiaoyi in a business deal in Beijing, and she later moves to their flat after witnessing the brutal murder of her housemate. Thus, five Chinese people who have no family relationships form a new family in Australia. However, this is a patriarchal family and the familial relationship is hierarchical, with a ‘perfect’ man dominating the ‘faulty’ men as well as the women. Li Mengfei is kind-hearted and always ready to help others, but as a businessman, he is bent solely on making profit. He gambles in the casino and loses almost all his money. Later on he is coaxed by a treacherous Chinese man into opening a brothel and nearly ends up in prison. Jiang Xiaofan “regards himself as a talented scholar, prides himself upon his scholar family background, and takes every opportunity to show off his knowledge” (Ying 1997, p. 31). He is conceited and selfish. These two ‘faulty’ men need a role model to emulate.
For the third-person narrator, neither the businessman masculinity embodied in Li Menfei nor the scholar masculinity represented by Jiang Xiaofan is the ideal model of Chinese masculinity. The ideal model is an amalgam of an intellectual, a fighter, a businessman and more importantly, a socialist/nationalist. This ideal masculinity is represented by Lu Dapeng. Lu is an intellectual, which is demonstrated not only by his profound knowledge of history and philosophy but also by the oratorical capability he displays in his defence of socialism in a debate held at the University of Melbourne. Lu is also physically tough: in an arm wrestling match, he defeats Peter, the strong-bodied hairy foreman in the factory where he works as a welder. However, the narrator puts a
152 premium on Lu’s nationalist stance:
Hundreds of years ago, Chinese who were wandering all over the world struggled to survive by taking the most menial jobs such as running restaurants, washing clothes and doing causal work. However, today, when we come out of the ‘yellow earth’, what we carry are not woks and bowls, or shovels and spades, but knowledge and expertise. Will we inherit the legacy of our ancestors? Chinese will have to establish a new image in the world (p. 237).
Lu’s identity as a businessman is inextricably linked to his political mission of ‘establishing a new Chinese image in the world’. He establishes a company which provides technological services, calling on his fellow Chinese to join him for this nationalist undertaking. Lu’s nationalist behaviour is indicative of the entrenched influence of CCP’s socialist discourse. Meanwhile, given that his mobilisation takes place in a diasporic context, one may argue that it is a strategy taken by migrant men against being rendered powerless. Schiller defines ‘long-distance nationalism’ as “a set of identity claims and practices that connect people living in various geographical locations to a specific territory that they see as their ancestral home” (Schiller 2004, p. 570). According to Schiller, “the immigrants who experience a loss of social standing maintain their personal self-esteem by identifying with the homeland” (p. 578). For Chinese men such as Lu who have lost their elite status in Australia, ‘long-distance nationalism’ enables them to claim a sense of identity.
Contrasted with problematic men such as Li Mengfei and Jiang Xiaofan, Lu Dapeng’s heroic image is further confirmed through the admiration of women. The female character Lin Yun serves as a foil for Lu Dapeng. Lu Dapeng’s male charm is
described in physical terms, and it is established through Lin Yun’s eyes:
Lin Yun raised her head slightly and stared at Lu Dapeng’s angular face. She felt that her heart was beating violently…. Lin Yun threw herself into the embrace of the second man in her life and leaned on his broad chest (italics my emphasis) (Ying 1997, pp. 193-194).
In sharp contrast to Cheng Xiaoyi who is “naïve and immature”, Lin Yun is “cool-headed, firm and persistent” (p. 222). However, even this independent and strong-willed woman succumbs to Lu Dapeng. She cannot help but fall in love with Lu Dapeng, although he is a married man:
Dapeng is ordinary, but he is a real man. It seems that his heart accommodates another world. He has never mentioned his past nor looked back on the road he has walked on. He is always looking far into the future, exploring and pursuing. I love him. Even though I am aware that this love is painful, I am ready to bear the pain (p. 287).
In the previous chapter, I argued that in order to prove that Chinese masculinity is in crisis, Chinese men are portrayed as being abandoned by their female counterparts. Here, to prove that Lu Dapeng is a ‘real man’, Chinese women such as Lin Yun are shown to be attracted to him. In both situations, Chinese women, who are presented as devoid of independent thinking and spiritual pursuits, function only as a device to prove Chinese men’s masculinity. The relationship between Lu Dapeng and Chinese women is suggestive of the ‘hero-beauty’ (yingxiong meiren) motif which is prevalent in classical Chinese literature. In his examination of classical novels such as Romance
of the Three Kingdoms, Huang argues that the “heroic image of men needs to be
authenticated or enhanced by the appreciation of a beautiful woman, as empowered in the so-called hero-beauty convention” (Huang 2006, p. 7). Though the ‘hero’ has transformed from a macho man in imperial China to a nationalist in Australia, the
154 Chinese women in Ying’s narrative have not changed their status as the enslaved beauty whose duty it is to submit to and serve the ‘hero’.
The novel ends on a nationalist note. Li Mengfei’s uncle, an old Chinese expatriate in Singapore, donates thirty million US dollars to Lu Dapeng in the hope that Lu Dapeng can lead his compatriots to “change the national image of China” (Ying 1997, p. 345). This is a national obligation every Chinese who goes abroad is required to carry out. The novel suggests that to accomplish this mission, Chinese abroad should be united under the leadership of a perfect man like Lu Dapeng, who possesses not only knowledge and physical prowess, but also conventional communist doctrine. Lu Dapeng reminds one of the heroic gao, da, quan stereotypes – “men of upright and unfailing moral character found in the CCP’s didactic literature” (Zhong 2000, p. 89). The ideal masculinity embodied by Lu Dapeng conforms to the wen-wu construct. However, it also extends beyond the wen-wu scheme, embracing more attributes including business accomplishments and nationalism/patriotism. The author Ying Ge had been a government official before he migrated to Australia in 1989. It is not difficult to associate him with his fictional character Lu Dapeng due to their similar experience in China. Thus, if the frustrated male image discussed in the previous chapter realistically reflects the plight of male intellectuals in Australia, the heroic image of Lu Dapeng can be read as the fantasy of a male intellectual and government official about striving to fulfil the national dream of “revitalizing China as a nation-state” abroad (Ying 1997, p. 345).