Three Days to Walk: a personal story of life writing and disability consciousness in China

Abstract

Through a close reading of Three Days to Walk, a memoir of disability by Chinese writer Zhang Yuncheng, this paper develops a new understanding of self-narrated life writing and its intersection with disability consciousness in the contemporary Chinese context. It examines the changing nature of disability life writing since the end of the early 1980s, a time when the images and voices of disabled began to emerge from effective cultural invisibility and silence. In a move away from state-sponsored ‘triumph over tragedy’ biographical narratives typical of the immediate post-Cultural Revolution period, Three Days to Walk is characteristic of a new popular trend to publish self-narrated life stories that reveal unique and intimate histories of disability experience both imbued with and propelled by a burgeoning sense of disability consciousness in the Chinese context.

Keywords:

• Life writing
• China
• disability consciousness
• self-representation
• identity

Acknowledgements

In preparing this article, I have benefited tremendously from the generous comments and constructive criticism of Tim Wright, Hugo Dobson, participants of the China panel at the IABA Conference (2010), and the two anonymous referees.

Notes

1. Feiren, the term used in the original, is a derogatory one meaning both ‘good-for-nothing/useless person’ and ‘disabled person’. The prevalence of this negative stereotyping is the root of the counterclaim ‘disabled but not useless’.

2. The heroism of injured war veterans, by contrast, was a significant element in the Communist myth-making landscape from the 1940s, although Diamant (2009) suggests that the gulf between representation and real-life experience was wide indeed. By the late 1960s, however, the visibility of even these had decreased dramatically with the trend towards revolutionary romanticism and its emphasis on healthy bodies.

3. The Chinese title Jiaru wo neng xingzou santian mirrors the Chinese translation for Helen Keller’s Three Days to See – Jiaru gei wo santian guangming.

4. He is initially told that he will probably only live to 28.

5. The phrase used – wukui shengming – literally means ‘a life of which one need not be ashamed’.

6. A public service undertaking that aims to enable children in poor areas to complete elementary school.

7. See http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4d3978bb0100b9lc.html.

8. Analogies to international disabled exemplars are relatively commonplace: see, for example, the title of Zhang Xini’s (2005) autobiography – If I Were Helen.

9. See http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4d3978bb0100diri.html.

10. A blog post elaborates that he was not tremendously familiar with Beckham at the time, although the use of a football-related background (now replaced) suggests more than a passing interest in the sport. See http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4d3978bb010082ye.html.

11. See http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4d3978bb01000bgy.html.

12. As Couser (1997, 182–183) reminds us, he needs to be anomalous or extraordinary to be sufficiently interesting.

13. My use of this term is informed by Susan Peter’s (2000) syncretic view of disability culture.

14. For the broader Chinese context, see Farqhuar (2002, 179).