Lao She Analysis

As the previous chapter briefly touches upon, the five-year life in London distanced Lao She from the chaos of political and cultural debates since the May Fourth. This chapter goes in depth of the impact of Lao She’s transnational history on his understanding of the nation. It argues that apart from the China as the political entity as always known, the China in Lao She’s literary world is displaced and no longer the one in the modern sense of the nation. The juxtaposition of Cat City with Erma and Little Po draws attention to Lao She’s transnational experience to complicate one’s understanding of Lao She’s discursive formation of China. By analyzing the common interest of the three novels, i.e. the discourse of youth and children, it argues

Erma thus can be seen as Lao She’s attempt to inquiry into and question with his own nationalistic affection for the country as well as the paradox of such diasporic nationalism. Wang further comments that Ma Wei is “condescending yet sympathetic portrait of the patriot as a young man,” and that his patriotism actually is an ironic reflection of his narcissism of himself, which explains the ending in which he does not return to China. Moreover, Ma Wei’s ambivalence and escapism show Lao She’s preservation of hope in youth from the disappointing condition of China that they “help to sustain one’s romantic yearning for the lost motherland.” However, it is too early and rather teleological to conclude such that it would necessarily lead to his more melancholy delineation of the nation and his patriotism exhibited in Cat City, since he would not know the reality and the stark contrast between his imagination and the real China until he returned to China in 1930. Hence, instead of a representation of Lao She’s pessimism of the nation, at this point, Erma would more be a reflection of his state of mind that he remained a bystander of China’s rising nationalism among youth and the ambivalent subject of such nationalistic

He had seen hope in Singapore’s children and youth that the former could represent an untainted frontier, and the latter the genuine passion for nationalistic love. Yet he also saw through the reality of racial relation in the Singaporean society and perhaps China’s owing to his peripheral ethnic identity. This is likely to be the reason that he coated his story as an innocent fairy tale, which is supposed to have a “liberating” effect and which not merely can “compensate for what is lacking in reality but can be used in reality to supply practical criticism of oppressive conditions and the hope for surmounting them.” Lao She’s biographical, transnational, and transcolonial histories thus run into each other and thereby complicate his treatment of the fairy tale and the discourse of children. It can be seen that his narrative of the nation and nationalism, under such circumstances, shifts from a reflection of imperialism and the position of China and Chinese people vis-a-vis the West in Erma, to an internalized confusion in Little Po about the possibility and future of China within an obfuscated modern nationalistic