Her Bosom Friends: Ding Ling, Postsocialism, and the Critical Possibilities of Female Intimacy

Recalling her experience of the Yan’an Talks in the post-socialist 1980s, Ding Ling wrote “I had never previously imagined that I could have bosom friends (zhiji) amongst the masses, because my bosom friends were all writers.” The significance of the Maoist cultural project, in Ding Ling’s account, was the way that it opened the possibility of new relations of affective intimacy between intellectuals and the masses, so that they might become “bosom friends.” This was true above all of relations between Ding Ling herself and the collectivities of working women that she encountered as a culture worker. This paper identifies the formulation of gendered friendship in Ding Ling’s work as amongst the major critical interventions that informed her engagements with the Chinese Revolution. It does so above all in relation to the post-socialist 1970s and 1980s, when Ding Ling’s rehabilitation was accompanied by intense pressure to join the totalizing repudiation of the revolutionary period. A reading of her late work, however, shows how Ding Ling repeatedly invoked the figure of her “bosom friends” (zhiji) to develop a feminist response to the revolutionary period, beyond either repudiation or celebration. My paper attends in particular to the role of biography as a textual form capable of sustaining the emancipatory possibilities of intimate friendship, including her late story “Du Wanxiang” and its associated paratexts, her own memoir, Living Amongst Wind and Snow, and the textual recurrence of Ding Ling’s own mother as a site of memory, mourning and intimacy.