Abstract
Wang Wenxing’s Bei hai de ren 背海的人 (Backed against the sea) deals with the personal and social danger of undisciplined desire in the context of a country undergoing capitalist modernization (both industrialization and urbanization). It deals with desire in terms of Buddhism and liberalism. This chapter argues that the novel represents liberalism as a more capacious container for desire than Buddhism, and it offers a not entirely negative sketch of the bourgeois family. Wang Wenxing critiqued the traditional Chinese family, and the family in general, in his first novel, Jia bian 家變 (Family catastrophe). Backed Against the Sea shows the reader what fate might have in store for a vulnerable, dissolute person who is so worried about getting tied down that he never forms a family on Taiwan.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Reading Wang Wenxing : critical essays |
| Editors | Shu-Ning SCIBAN, Ihor PIDHAINY |
| Place of Publication | New York |
| Publisher | Cornell University East Asia Program |
| Chapter | 3 |
| Pages | 53-77 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781942242789 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781939161581, 9781939161789 |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |
| Externally published | Yes |