Transcultural Memory in Visions and Realities

Abstract

This article examines Fang Fang’s book Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City from the lens of transcultural memory, by analyzing her account of pandemic experience as a memory text translatable to the globe. First, after an overview of Fang Fang’s diary and its reception and publication, I examine how this memory text originates from her affective testimony with a historical consciousness. Specifically, I emphasize its ethical approach to processing individual trauma by transposing it into collective memory which matters to all around the globe traumatized by the pandemic, particularly in countering purposeful forgetting and politicization of testimonial writing. Next, I explicate the conception of transcultural memory in order to reveal how Fang Fang’s diary constitutes a text of transculturally shared memory. On this basis, I uncover the ethical relations that ground this memory text of transcultural memory meaningful for its overseas readers, in terms of the accommodability of complex emotions, generation of discursive spaces, and creation of co-occurrence between Wuhan’s past and the world’s ongoing pandemic. Finally, I propose to imagine the community of memory which is enabled by transcultural memories. By defining “the community of memory,” I argue that it demonstrates a new perspective to perceive memory practices that transcend national and cultural bonding and transgress existing tensions with “the other.”

Notes

Notes

1 A short bio of Fang Fang is available in Paper Republic: Chinese Literature In Translation: “Fang Fang 方方 汪芳,” Paper Republic. Accessed August 10, 2022, https://paper-republic.org/pers/fang-fang/. For more about Fang Fang, see Hemant Adlakha, “Fang Fang: The ‘Conscience of Wuhan’ Amid Coronavirus Quarantine,” The Diplomat, March 23, 2020, https://thediplomat.com/2020/03/fang-fang-the-conscience-of-wuhan-amid-coronavirus-quarantine/.

2 This introduction to Fang Fang’s diary and its publication is based on my article “Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diaries Are a Personal Account of Shared Memory,” The Conversation, May 19, 2020, https://theconversation.com/fang-fangs-wuhan-diaries-are-apersonal-account-of-shared-memory-1 38007#comment_2227538.

3 Howard Y. F. Choy comments in his review of Michael Berry’s translation of Fang Fang’s diary, “The phenomenon is worth studying because it indicates people’s need to carry on writing and reading as therapeutic treatments against the trauma of the plague. It involves not the various treatments discussed in the diary—which New York publisher HarperCollins disclaims as medical advice on its copyright page—but what Rita Charon calls ‘narrative medicine.’ According to Charon, ‘the telling and listening to stories of self … are themselves enabled by illness.’(10) Hence, disease is not only the content of a story but also the condition of storytelling.”

4 Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary, entry Jan. 25.

5 Ibid., entry Feb. 4. Quotations from Fang’s book are referred from an online resource without page numbers.

6 Rushdie, Imaginary Homeland, 12.

7 Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary, Introduction.

8 Ibid., entry Feb. 4.

9 See Lacapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 23: “traumas that paradoxically become the valorized or intensely cathected basis of identity for an individual or a group rather than events that pose the problematic question of identity.” In this case, traumatic memory, particularly from victims, can be endowed a meaning as the representation of sublimated national trauma.

10 For details of Fang Fang’s statement of the publication of her book, see “Doubt, Support and Misunderstanding: Opinions on ‘The Overseas Publication of Fang Fang’s Diary’” (“Zhiyi, zhichi yu wujie: women ying ruhe kandai ‘fangfang riji zaihaiwai chuban’?” 质疑、支持与误解：我们应如何看待‘方方日记在海外出版’？), ifeng.com, Apr. 11, 2020, https://news.ifeng.com/c/7vaHV4ISVto.

11 Lopez-Mugica, Whyke, and Chen, “The Rite of Passage and Digital Mourning in Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary,” 443.

12 For details of these concepts, see Erll, “Travelling Memory”; Assmann and Conrad, eds., Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories; Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound.”

13 Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 14.

14 Creet and Kitzmann, Memory and Migration, 9.

15 Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound,” 87.

16 Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary, entry Jan. 22.

17 Ibid., entry Jan. 26.

18 Ibid., entry Jan. 26.

19 Ibid., entry Feb. 25.

20 Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 69.

21 •••

22 See Huyssen, Present Pasts, 28: “we try to counteract this fear and danger of forgetting with survival strategies of public and private memorialization”. From his perspective, the ubiquitous forgetting of atrocities begins with the appropriation of local memories by authorized discourses and memorial rituals.

23 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7-8.

24 Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 2-11.

25 For comments and reviews of the book, see Adlakha, “Fang Fang;” “Chinese Writer Faces Backlash for ‘Wuhan Diary,’” France 24, April 22, 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200422-chinese-writer-faces-backlash-for-wuhan-diary; Fang Fang, “Wuhan Diary Author—There is No Tension Between Me and the Country,” Caixin Global, April 12, 2020, https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-04-12/blog-wuhan-diary-author-there-is-no-tension-between-me-and-the-country-101541748.html; H. Davidson, “Chinese Writer Faces Online Backlash Over Wuhan Lockdown Diary,” The Guardian, April 10, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/10/chinese-writer-fang-fang-faces-online-backlash-wuhan-lockdown-diary.

26 The conclusion is partly based on my article “Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diaries.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meng Xia

Meng Xia was granted her PhD from the Faculty of Arts, Design, and Architecture at the University of New South Wales, with a project on memory, trauma, and narrative in overseas Chinese migrant fiction. She lectured at the Communications University of Zhejiang, China. She has published peer reviewed journal articles, editorials, book reviews, and translations. Her research interests include memory, narrative, diaspora, theatre, and reception theories.