Almost Comrades: Bai Lang and Feminist Anti-Imperialism across the Cold War Divide

The early 1950s was marked by an intense series of international encounters between feminists and activists who mobilized a language of womens rights and motherhood to oppose the prospect of further war. Underpinning these efforts was the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), which, in 1951, organized a transnational delegation of women to investigate claims of war crimes against the people of North Korea. This paper examines these histories from a literary perspective, through the role of Bai Lang. Having emerged in the 1930s as one of the Northeastern contingent of Manchurian writers, Bai Lang came to be intensely involved in feminist peace movement of the 1950s, and participated in the WIDF delegation. In particular, the paper traces the friendship that emerged between Bai Lang on the one hand, as articulated through her reportage collection Seven Days in Pyongyang, and, on the other, the British peace activist and fellow delegate Monica Felton, as recounted in her travelogue That’s Why I Went. I connect the textual encounters between these two women to other instances of sisterly friendship in Bai Lang’s writing, including her pre-1949 relationship with Xiao Hong, and her 1956 Korean War novel concerned with female medical workers, Advancing on the Rails. In these terms, I read the ways the authors of these texts stage their growing affection with one another in order to pose “friendship” itself as a theoretical and political category, and one that bears on the complex entanglements between feminism and anti-imperialism in the early Cold War.