ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009

〈Response 1 to Rey chow〉“Autumn Hearts” /「愁」, or, Poetics of Memory and Oblivion:
A Response to Rey Chowʼs “Autumn Hearts”

Keiko Nitta
The nature of literary imagination, which ﬂows across singular and unique origins of divers
individual texts, probably allowed me to remember the following appeal of one mother figure
appearing in a literary text somewhat distant from our ﬁlm,

: “Who had pity foryou when you were sad among the strangers?” This is the question the ghostly hallucination ofStephen Dedalusʼs mother in James Joyceʼs(1923) presents to her son in the chapter 15,“Circe.” I guess this outlandish association of mine seems to be neither really illogical nor coincidental. This novel, a modernist master text, quite uniquely represents a pathetic positioning of
mother that enters into the questions of love, loss, identity and otherness. The novelʼs Odyssey̶
Telemachia plot is usually considered to prioritize the story of fatherʼs and sonʼs mutual searchingfor one another. Yet actually, the ﬁgure of Stephenʼs mother motivates her son to return to Irelandfrom his self-imposed exile to Paris and continues to haunt him after her death, as if reminding
him of the impossibility of filiation without a memory of estranged members. The mother̶̶
who begged her son “with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her” only to be refused(“Telemachus”)̶̶continuously occupies his psyche as the source of grief and self‑accusation. Her
persistent return requires Stephen to recognize her as the untranslatable internal alterity, whereas
his desire for his father is supplemented by the encounter with Leopold Bloom.
Joyce has correctly articulated a mother with the pity for someone being estranged from her
kinfolk. The position of outsider inscribed in a mother in a patriarchal institution informs her
particular compassion for a stranger. It is a mother who embodies a secret ﬁssure in the solidarityof kindred. Even though the ﬁssure also discloses an inevitable inclusion of exteriority in every
patriarchal family and thus anticipates its innate possibility of reconﬁguring inside and outside,that essential exteriority is often forgotten. Such a forgetting ﬁnishes the surface homogeneity ofmembers of a household, including the mother herself. Her double status of the mother/daughterin-law is indeed perfected through forgetting her origin. Furthermore, this forgetfulness has toentail the oblivion of her forgetting itself. A mother/stranger in general, accordingly, rarely grieves
for herself in an actual everyday life; after making her wedding ritual a glorious ceremony ofmourning for her past, she spontaneously starts participating in sustaining and reproducing her
in-law lineage. In contrast with Stephenʼs dying mother who incessantly demands her son toremember her and throws him into melancholy with the abject image of “the green sluggish bile,”
the stigma of a general mother/stranger is secretly accumulated.

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Keiko Nitta “Autumn Hearts” /「愁」, or, Poetics of Memory and Oblivion

I am sure that an attempt to recollect motherʼs forgotten sorrow of and for a stranger shallformulate a “feminine drama” as Professor Rey Chow demonstrates through her analysis on. As Professor Chow emphasizes the signiﬁcance of the cinematic ﬂashbacks as adevice for shedding light on the clandestine psychological theater of Hueyin and Aiko, juxtaposition of diﬀerent pasts, or artistic reversion of the times in real life irreversible, is indispensable
in the process of recollection. Besides, insofar as self-conscious women creators and artists
reformulate those lost experiences as the feminine dramas, their representation takes the shape ofsomething diﬀerent from the uncanny and abject ﬁgure as represented by Stephenʼs mother. Confusion of the present and the past as well as repetitive returns of the past will, as the Freudian
psychoanalytic theory explains, necessarily accompany the horrifying experiences on the part ofthe subject who commits the psychological labor. The ﬁlmmaker Ann Hui has perhaps centralized
the autumn hearts̶̶or a pathos the Chinese character 愁 (meaning a general quality that evokes
sadness or pity) represents̶̶as an alternative poetic medium for portraying the concealed griefof a mother as outsider. The motif of autumn hearts that Chow illustrates as a privileged subject
matter in the tradition of Chinese womenʼs writings may have enabled women authors to extract
a “heavy sense of melancholy and loss,” while disarticulating its path to abjection. If sentimental,
its lyricism and poeticity provide them with an advantage in their witnessing of womenʼs “psychicinteriority.”
One of the major signiﬁcances ofseems to me to be found in its presenta-tion of individual womenʼs̶̶a motherʼs and a daughterʼs̶̶“psychic interiority” as the process of
spontaneous search for the ways to survive in the dynamics of history and institutional inevitability. This search is certainly sentimental, but the sentimental eventually turns out to be a poetic(creative) tactic to reconcile with a political diﬃculty. For the part of the daughter, Hueyin, theprocess functions as more like a delayed tracing of the secret identity of her mother. As I haveargued in the beginning, that secret intrinsically concerns the outsider status of the mother; yetin this mother Aikoʼs case, her alienness is still magniﬁed for her closet fact of having come fromthe imperial Japan. Through the knowledge of her motherʼs origin or otherness, Hueyin becomessomebody who obligatory takes on a secret larger than herself. Indeed, the secret is not simply
a reason for the conﬂict between her mother and grandparents, but a more signiﬁcant politicalbackground that causes the basic trouble in securing a footing for her family; this is the trouble
with which Hueyinʼs grandparents have, analogous with Aiko, been faced secretly.
In the beginning of the ﬁlm, the spectator and Hueyin recalling her childhood events may
both understand the problem of her family as that of “the unyielding domination of Chinese family life” having marginalized and rejected Aiko. This confrontation, however, cannot be concluded
as the powerful kinship structureʼs exclusion of the powerless stranger. Despite the grandparentsʼ
ostracizing Aiko the foreigner, they themselves have actually no stable national background; thus
in that sense, the term “exile” designates not only Aiko, Hueyin (a returnee from England) andher sister (an emigrant to Canada), but also the grandparents.

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ジェンダー研究 第12号 2009

In this regard, the director of the film quite suggestively intersperses symbols of thegrandparentsʼ foreignness in Hueyinʼs homey memory of her dependence with them. First, eachof the two scenes Hueyin is given her grandmotherʼs Chinese snacks is highlighted by an airmail
envelope in which a portion of snacks is enclosed. The grandparentsʼ address of aﬀection to thegranddaughter in the form of food, hence, implies that their kinship bond should be dispersed
abroad. Next, in probably one of the most impressive scenes, in which the grandfather gives little
Hueyin a suggestion that she would study hard to become a medical doctor and serve China, hementions the achievements of Sun Zhongshan (孫中山). If Sun is the great precursor upon whom
Hueyin is supposed to model herself, Sunʼs career in exile to Japan, the U.S., and England, at thesame time predictably endorses her later life in passage as well as the centrifugal trajectory of
Aikoʼs personal history. Finally and most signiﬁcantly, the direct cause of grandfathersʼ stroke inthe last scene turns out to be a tough interrogation by the Red Guards about his possession of ananthology of poems of the Song Dynasty (宋詩選). Actually, the grandfather attempts to obtain
the book as a gift for Hueyin. If a structure of national literature can represent a character of anation, as Johann Gottfried von Herder envisioned, this incident at the close of the ﬁlm signiﬁes
the possibility that the grandfatherʼs sense of belongingness is in a peculiar way frustrated even in
the mainland China.
Let alone Portuguese Macau, Guangdong in the era of the Cultural Revolution does not
become a home for the grandparentsʼ peaceful life. This depressing episode whose underlying
causes include the colonial domination and the subsequent political dysfunction in a modernChinese history, nonetheless, possibly constitutes the most meaningful as well as ethical aspect of
the ﬁlm. That is to say, the narrative progression in the ﬁlm unfolds Hueyinʼs awareness of hermotherʼs struggle for life in the Chinese kinship family and of grandparentsʼ disillusionment about
China as the stronghold of the familial unity in a same historical horizon. When the spectator
perceive the common vulnerability that interlocks the fates of Aikoʼs and her parents‑in‑lawʼs,they will also recognize an interest of the ﬁlm̶̶not merely directed to aﬃrming the traditionof Chinese family. While observing the kinshipʼs power of absorbing peopleʼs cravings, the ﬁlm
seems to me to disclose various acts of remembering and forgetting that operate the sense ofbelonging.
Even the seemingly authoritative grandparentsʼ family that cannot automatically guarantee asense of stability, therefore, requires an active mnemonic commitment. As the grandfatherʼs instructions for Hueyin not to forget her origin (through the literary lessons), to serve her nation, andnot to lose hope for her country, demonstrate, a conscious remembering advocated in the familystrongly connects up with the memory of national culture and history. On the other hand, thespeciﬁc backgrounds for Aikoʼs personal condition urge her to forget her origin as the prerequisite
process for assimilating into her husbandʼs foreign kindred. Although some personal causes,
including the frustrated love for Arakawa, primarily determine Aikoʼs mindset that compels herto forget, her realization of inability to fantasize her native country Japan as her permanent55

Keiko Nitta “Autumn Hearts” /「愁」, or, Poetics of Memory and Oblivion

homeland eventually enhances the political intentionality of effacing her memory. Her elder
brotherʼs decision to sell her parentʼs house̶̶which means the termination of her future possibility to return to her native place̶̶and her younger brotherʼs antagonism with her still inﬂaming
due to her marring a Chinese man, while he has failed to die in a suicide attack unit, conjointly
inform her disillusionment that accelerates her identiﬁcation with the Chinese family despite itsexclusiveness.
Benedict Anderson argues that not only remembering but also forgetting is indispensable fornormalizing oneʼs sense of belonging to an imagined community. As if testiﬁes to the practicalityof this procedure, Aiko and her parents‑in‑law respectively exercise their creative agencies
for locating themselves in certain communalities. Although the national boundary has earlier
distanced them irreconcilably, Hueyinʼs consciousness ﬁnds a connection between the two parties
in terms of their common disillusionment over the secure existence of homeland in addition toexperiences of exile. Hueyinʼs sensitivity to autumn hearts recuperates the sense of sorrows andsuﬀerings both Aiko and the grandparents have secretly endured. Insofar as Hueyin brings theirdisparate experiences together under the common grief of strangers, the poetics for recognizing
their survival inevitably entails a mournful expression. Aikoʼs and Hueyinʼs journey to Japan isclosed with the symbolic bon dance for commemorating the dead, while Hueyinʼs ﬂashbacks to
her happy childhood with grandparents are ﬁlled with lotus blossoms (the symbol for Nirvana).
Autumn hearts, accordingly, provides the cinematic characters with a resource of inventing
a new way of imagining the bonds of aﬀection between the self and the other. The assumptionof the community of strangers or exiles who share such a pathos as Autumn hearts, 愁, as thereminder of oneʼs vulnerability, solitude and dependence sounds a way too much sentimental.
The very ﬁnal shot of a bridge that literally concludes the ﬁlm, however, appears to signify anactive and creative potential of a mournful sentiment. Does the recollection of exteriority of amother revitalize the susceptibility to and responsibility for the sadness of a stranger as idealized
by the ﬁlmʼs sentimentality? If aﬃrmative, we may be able to envision a proﬁle of kinship thatis no longer a mere institution for the exclusive as well as selective aﬃliation on the imaginativeextension of the ﬁlmʼs sentimental fabulations.
(Keiko Nitta, Associate Professor, Department of English, Rikkyo University)

Works Cited
Chow, Rey.
Joyce, James.

56. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.
. 1923. New York: Vintage, 1990.