In last week’s Feminine Literary Exhibition, Dr. Fan Ming-ju, Professor of Chinese Literature, TKU, said, “A serious minded woman should set out to blaze the trails of feminine literature and give it a permanent place in the history of literature.”
“Furthermore,” she continued, “so many voices were hushed and silenced in our history, and the woman’s voice is one of them. We have a duty to dig out this lost voice. This is, of course, the primary duty of the Research Room for Women’s Role in Literature.”
In the past week, we are brought closer to the realities of women in literature thru the eyes (the medium is the film) and the mind (the medium is the book). Vividly and astoundingly we see and feel the feminine sensibilities crystallized in such epoch-making writers of the 20th century. There are 36 of them, but we could only cite a few to illustrate their importance: Eileen Chang, Chi Chiun, Lin Hai-yin, Chen Juo-hsi, Ping Hsin and Huang Pi-yun.
On the film side, 7 movies directed by women were shown. But the most outstanding one is a documentary film depicting the true story of Chen Hsiu-hsi, a pioneering woman poet. “My Pen”, a poem that won the 2nd Prize in an International Poetry Contest by beating more than 20,000 contestants, deals with the wretched situation of Japanese colonialism. When finally Ms. Chen visited Japan, one of the male professors was so ashamed of the atrocity of his government that he literally knelt down before her to show his regret and repentance for the havoc of one race done to another.
Another documentary film is even more amazing. It is an account of women writing---a script invented by a group of women in China. In order to escape the persecution of patriarchal society, they initiated a new cryptic mode of writing. The script looks like a picture, but slimly beautiful, just like a woman. The woman script conveys a lot of sentiments unknown to men. It is reported that the suicide rate of women in the provinces of Hunan and Hupei was drastically reduced because their tension in mind was released. How amazing.
UPDATE： 2010/09/27
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