Journeys to the Northwest: Lin Pengxia and the Limits of Narration

From November 1932 to June 1933, Lin Pengxia, China’s first female aviator, undertook a widely publicized solo journey through Qinghai, Ningxia, Suiyuan, Gansu, and Shaanxi. On the one hand, the articles narrating Lin’s journey were part of a surge of publications on the Northwest that appeared during the 1930s. But unlike her contemporaneous travelers (all of them men) whose reports and investigations also found their way into books and specialist journals, Lin herself was born into an array of print spaces that were not at all the haunts of borderland enthusiasts or specialists. In the frenzy of narratives that emerged around her, she began to appear in the local news sections and opinion columns of print mediums like Shanghai Daily, bringing the faraway and loosely integrated Northwest into the everyday experience of urban life. Indeed, whether she was appearing herself in public at various events around Shanghai, or writing reports from the field that were then reproduced in magazines like Linloon, Lin was an ongoing spectacle who blurred the boundaries between the literary and the scientific, the political and the private, the traditional and the modern, the domestic and the foreign, the male and the female. By focusing on the ways in which Lin’s journey was rendered into print during and immediately after her initial journey, this paper explores the ways in which Lin herself became a site upon which gender, territory, and technology were thrown together in altogether unprecedented ways. By drawing on newspaper and magazine articles written about her journey, as well as those in which she appears as a contributing author and/or photographer, I analyze the ways in which both Lin’s body and an alien landscape were portrayed alongside one another during a period in which concerns about territorial and corporeal integrity pervaded literature and print.