Subjectivity and Class Consciousness in Hong Ying's Autobiographical Novel The Hungry Daughter

This essay studies Hong Ying's Hungry Daughter primarily as a novel, treating its autobiographical structure and enunciation as novelistic techniques aimed at developing a doubled subjectivity that straddles past and present to give the memory of social suffering a class consciousness. Choosing not to treat the work as purely a memoir, I highlight the fictional form of narration in the work's character portrayal and temporal configuration. I undertake to show how the personal and the private in Hong Ying's novel invariably lead outward to the collective experience. By focusing on the novel's distinctive qualities in developing a class-conscious subjectivity that mediates between the lived experience of suffering and the writer's imagination, I seek to set the work apart from the trendy memoir writing that produces cross-cultural commodities.