Negotiating the Past: Gender Inequality in Chuang Hua’s Crossings

Chuang Hua’s Crossings (1968) deserves a special place in the literary history of Asian America. Written at a critical juncture of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the neglected novel heralds Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) inasmuch as the issue of gender is central in both works. The protagonist of Crossings, Jane, was born in China but has grown up in the United States in a patriarchal household. After she engages in a love affair in Paris with a French journalist, Jane’s familial and personal pasts continue to invade her consciousness, and discernible in the episodic flashbacks are the interrelated issues of parental gender bias and the discord between the female protagonist and her brother. As the fourth daughter of a Chinese patriarchal family, Jane has enjoyed less parental attention than her two younger brothers, particularly James. Therefore, when James incurs the displeasure of his parents by marrying a Caucasian woman without their consent, Jane transfers her repressed grudge against her spoiled brother to his wife, whom she feels is a “barbarian.” This paper explores the blending by Chuang Hua of two complex symbolic themes—the very traditionally Chinese theme of patriarchy and gender discrimination and that of racial discrimination—which we get when the possibility arises (to the delight of the family patriarch, Jane’s father) that James’ wife will have a son. At the end, after various twists and complications, Jane decides to go to Paris for a year rather than expose the real source of her hostility toward her brother’s wife: the “Law of the Father.” The reading of the novel offered here also takes Chuang Hua’s intensive deployment of the past as suggesting that it is never really “past,” but rather an integral part of the present.