'The poor woman': A critical analysis of Asian theology and contemporary Chinese fiction by women

For most Third World intellectuals involved, postcolonial discourse involves criticism not related to a simple periodization but to a methodological revisionism which enables a wholesale critique of Western structures of knowledge and power. For more than five decades now Asian theologians have foregrounded Western constructions of the colonizer and colonized, of center and periphery, and challenged the dualism that shaped missionary theology during its transmission in the colonial years. Nevertheless, they have asserted in the process strong national and thereby regional identity with all its given connotations of progress, freedom and democracy and made it the identity of theology as they faced the challenges of nationalists of their respective countries toward Christianity. The fact is when the identity of being "Asian" in opposition to Western has been built so strongly into the methodology and content of theological discourse in Asia that it is "fixed" upon the double-edged axis of the "oppression" and "liberation" of a multi-religious mass. Accordingly, an Asian--whether man or woman--as articulated is always a victim and/or heroic fighter of a modern progressive program for nation-building.; Such an Asian versus Western self-understanding is found particularly problematic in Asian feminist theology. The most conspicuous result is found in the over-generalized representation of women in "the poor woman"--a victim of both imperialism of the West and all the social and political problems of Asian countries; and conversely, a fighter and rebel who fights for her fate and destiny despite extremely unfavorable circumstances under colonialism and its aftermath. Consequently, this formulation has seriously overlooked the multiple levels of existence and practice of people in different Asian countries, and particularly those of Asian women today. My subsequent study of the fiction of two Hong Kong women writers--Xi Xi and Wu Xubin is therefore an attempt to introduce a rich and complex discourse of women into the monolithic representation of women in Asian theological discourse, and hence its implication to an alternative theological formulation, and in this particular case, an alternative to the formulation of Asian feminist Christology.