Introduction to Palladii's Chinese literature of the Muslims

fear she delineates intrinsic to the system, or will it disappear with the end of the Cultural Revolution, and with the emergence of new leadership? The author is not explicit, but that is one of the strengths of her work. She lets the narrative speak for itself. In sharp contrast to the obvious political indignation of some Soviet dissident literature and the obvious ideological message of socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism that has characterized Chinese writing for the last few decades, her writing is matter of fact, restrained. But it is this very restraint that subtly affects the reader. Her technique perhaps owes more to Lu Hsiin than to any other writer. As Lu Hsiin does in his short stories, she relies on irony, terseness, indirect revelation, and understatement stripped of explicit moral injunctions. As in Lu Hsiin's stories, there is a blurred distinction between the author and the characters, and indirect speech reveals the inner thoughts and objective events. Unlike Lu Hsiin's stories, there are no experiments with basic literary technique and no use of symbolism. Some of her characters resemble those found in the May Fourth literature: they despair over their situation and are alienated from certain aspects of their society, yet they seek to support and play a part in that society. The May Fourth movement was a cultural and literary outburst of alienation from the system, but also a commitment to the society. May Fourth culture is now as much a part of Chinese tradition as any other Chinese tradition. Indeed, Chen's work is also in the tradition of pre-modern Chinese literature. A function of the Chinese literati was to voice dissent, to indicate social wrongs through literature. Though Chen was educated in the West and her stories were written outside China, her work is very much in that stream of Chinese tradition and enriches it anew.