Zhang Kangkang's the Invisible Companion

Zhang Kangkang's The Invisible Companion:

The Invisible Companion was published in 1986. It is not autobiographical, but the outline of the story basically corresponds to Zhang's own life experiences: A nineteen-year-old girl Xiao Xiao goes to the Great Northern Wilderness during the Cultural Revolution, gets married with an urban youth also from Hangzhou Chen Xu, bears a child, and soon divorces. She sends the one-month-old infant away to the paternal grandparents in the south. Xiao Xiao considers Chen Xu as the embodiment of her ideals - justice, honesty, and sincerity. But after marriage, she painfully realizes that she was wrong. Chen Xu constantly tells lies, cheating her and others. She questions the "truth, beauty, and virtue" once she regarded as the expression of human nature. Eventually she realizes (It is also Zhang aims to convey the theme that) everybody has an invisible and irrational self hiding under the surface of the rational self and controlled by the subconscious - the title "The Invisible Companion." Zhang (1996e: 367; 2002c: 74) herself states that this novel "definitely has no intention to reflect the disasters of the Cultural Revolution, to re-present the urban youth' life in the Great Northern Wilderness, or to probe into the moral issues of love and marriage."

But I intend to read the novel from the angle of motherhood and mother-child relationship. In her review article, Samira Kawash (2011: 990, 996) points out that motherhood studies have been "fragmented and discontinuous" in feminist research (see also Ross 1995). We have actually approached this theme of mother-child bond from reading the texts by Xiao Hong's The field of Life and Death and Zhang Ailing's Love in a Fallen City. In Xiao Hong's novel, women live in loveless family life in various interpersonal relationships including the one between mothers and daughters. Mother Wang even kills, deliberately or accidentally, her three-year-old daughter in order to survive, in order not to be "a wreck" (p.10). Golden Bough's mother scolds, curses, and beats her at will. She spit on her face, and violently kicks her daughter when she sees Golden Bough picks up green tomatoes: "Her mother pounced on her like a tiger, and soon Golden Bough's nose was bleeding" (p. 23). In Zhang Ailing's Love in a Fallen City, after Bai Liusu is spitefully and ruthless scolded and derided by her sister-in-laws, she comes to her mother for consolation, but only gets disappointment. Her mother replies her: "Staying on with me is not a feasible long-term plan. Going back is the decent thing to do" (p. 2). She suggests that Bai Liusu should go back to her late ex-husband family as a chaste widow enduring life-long loneliness and hostility. In despair, Bai Liusu "was kneeling forlornly by her mother's bed. ... She started sobbing aloud. 'Mother, Mother, please help me!' Her mother's face remained blank as she smiled on without saying a word. Wrapping her arms around her mother's legs, Liusu shook her violently and cried, 'Mother! Mother!' [But] [t]he mother she was praying to and the mother she really had were two different persons" (p.4). In another masterpiece of Zhang, The Golden Cangue, she writes that a mothers inhumanly destroys her own son's and daughter's happiness.

Zhang's writing on motherhood include novels The Invisible Companion (1986), The Gallery of Love (1996), and Women on the Edge (2006), novellas The Colorful Disk (1995), A Hourly Worker (1997), and Zhima (2003), and some of her essays about her own maternal experiences. These stories depict the dilemma confronted by physically absent and/or emotionally ambivalent mothers, and shed light on conditional maternal commitment, and the necessity and feasibility of cooperative child-rearing.

Conditional maternal commitment

Hrdy (1994, 1999a, 1999b, 2001, 2009) proves that a mother's commitment to her offspring is always contingent on circumstances and complicated by a range of considerations including costs and benefits of raising a child, socioeconomic constraints, maternal age and condition, availability of alloparental support, and the infant's sex and viability.

Motherhood is not a myth, neither exclusively a cultural construct. Against the idealized view of unconditional motherly devotion to their children, mothers in real life are strategists and opportunists as well as nurturers, always having to make tradeoffs between subsistence and reproductive efforts, between her vocation, ambition, and maternity (Hrdy 1999b: 29). Zhang herself in the real life and mothers in her stories have left their children with others (often the grandparents) for extended periods of time in order to work and fulfill their aspirations without encumbrance.

There are two continuums concerning the fluctuation of maternal responsiveness: in emotions, and in practical calculations and actual behaviors. In maternal affective responses to children, the continuum begins from the intense attachment to a child, goes though feelings of indifference, intolerance, estrangement, and neglect, and ends with overt hostility toward a child. The continuum of actual behaviors range from terminating investment (such as infanticide and abortion) and abandoning children at one extreme to the total maternal self-sacrifice at the other; in between lie various strategies and compromises that can reduce the immediate costs or overall outlays of parental efforts (Hrdy 1994: 6-9). In both these continuums, maternal responses are discriminatory, selective, and situation-dependent. "Less-than-fully-committed mothers and mothers who delegate care to others" fall within the spectrums of the two continuums, and are common, normal, and inevitable, if not pathological (Hrdy 1999b: 519).

If the economy deteriorates and alloparents are scarce, women young or old, unmarried or married, will curtail or even terminate the load of childcare (Hrdy 2001: 83). Deteriorating social and economic condition is, first of all, the predictor that foresees Xiao Xiao's retrenchment of maternal solicitude described in Zhang's novel The Invisible Companion. During the Cultural Revolution, the number of the dispossessed and displaced swelled. A proliferation of people precipitated into dislocation and destitution. Posited in the extremely tough environment in the north during the Cultural Revolution, a twenty-one-year-old novice mother seems to have no other option. The young couple finds it difficult even to provide themselves with the bare necessities. The arrival of a child can only reduce the family to beggarliness. They have