Slow Reading or Not at All: Fei Ming’s Ethics of Reticence

This paper close-reads the short fiction of Fei Ming (1901–1967). Widely appreciated for the recondite lyricism of his prose, Fei Ming has also been chided for the “obscurity” of his works, lauded for his refusal to accede to the nation-building imperatives of the New Literature of the May Fourth era, seen as a pastoral modernist, and interpreted in terms of his immersion in Buddhist thought and premodern Chinese poetics. I propose here that the stylistic obscurity of Fei Ming’s short stories may voice an ethical as much as an aesthetic impulse. At a syntactic and semantic level, Fei Ming’s work often gives us pause or omits critical information. His opacity forces us to read slowly, or not at all. Fei Ming’s early stories “The Story of the Bamboo Grove” (Zhulin de gushi, 1925) and “Mr. and Mrs. Zhang” (Zhang xiansheng yu Zhang taitai, 1927) appeared alongside the writings of May Fourth luminaries such as Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren on the pages of Word-Threads (Yusi). Is it possible to read Fei Ming’s reticence not as a repudiation of contemporary debates about realism, illiteracy, and the woman question but as a reflection on the limitations of the short story as a narrative form and an ethical response to the dilemmas of literary representation?