From 'orphans' to 'bastards': The legacy of the Cultural Revolution and contemporary Chinese allegories of the individual

The Cultural Revolution (1966--1976) as a political event may be history, but its legacy, often in unexpected ways, lives on. I intend to show that it is not until the Cultural Revolution that a Chinese Bildungsroman regarding both individual development and nation-building simultaneously found its national form and ran into deep crisis. Correspondingly, the whole conception of individual development that proved crucial in the formation of Western modernity was bastardized during the Cultural Revolution. This historical moment is most typically manifested in the development of the Red Guard generation during and after the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guard generation went through a process of transformation from "new men" into "orphans of history" and finally into "cultural bastards," whose peculiar "orphan-hood" and "bastardy" offers a unique site to reflect upon the very impossibility of representing Chinese modernity via convenient and ready-made modes of Western realism and modernism. I attempt to demonstrate that "cultural bastardy" is the norm of modern Chinese individual development and subject formation, and that this bastardization is crucial to our understanding of Chinese modernity. What is needed, then, is a "bastardized," instead of normative or canonical, narrative of Chinese modernity, in its relation to individual allegories and literary genres.; The main body of this study comprises textual and contextual readings of three most influential contemporary Chinese writers---Duoduo, Wang Shuo and Zhang Chengzhi. They each has a rather complicated and ambiguous relationship with the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, and each has also proffered a distinctive individual vision of Chinese modernity, through questioning and subverting the ideological and aesthetic boundaries of literary forms and genres. Their interconnected allegories of individual development, articulated vis-a-vis the collective legacy of the Cultural Revolution, have revealed the vicissitudes of individual development from the Cultural Revolution to the end of the 20th century.