Sentiment And Feminist Modes Of Knowing In The Chinese Rural Discourse

The paper is to investigate stories of Chinese senior women in rural areas, and to identify elements of indigenous or grass-rooted discourse taking in a living and organic presence in their daily life. Sentimental discourse like sai-gu (miserable), possibly influenced by Buddhism, is not only a genre of "telling miserable feelings", but a linguistic worldview, shaping traditional Chinese women's moral, intellectual, and spiritual sensibilities and becoming a mode of knowing the world, through which meanings of lives are felt, articulated, reflected, and constituted. We first present a triple dialogic approach to the analysis of the narrative of sentimentality. By doing so the aspects of meaning are interpreted not as a monologic discourse but in the relationships between the narrated events, the narrating events and the inquiring events which are trans-cultural and trans-historical in nature. The paper then turns to explore the meaning of sai-gu life of senior women through which the discursive practices of religion are interpreted. The analysis reveals that the way they articulate the significance of a sai-gu life and the language they use to make sense of religious life contribute to their intelligibility of the death and authenticity in Confucian and Taoist value. It is also found that the marginalized generation of Chinese women who are normally considered as narrow-minded have their unique way of critical thinking about modern and global phenomena. Their profound understanding about modern society is articulated in a discourse that is often unintelligible to the outside worlds, thus being completely ignored by the mainstream. The analysis in general presents a picture of a Chinese village's way of the discursive practice within modern social network. The paper concludes that through the study of senior women's sentimental discourse, on one hand, we are dipping into the spiritual nature of Chinese traditional culture and its influence on our politics and other fields. On the other hand, the traditional culture is tending to be marginalized by a modernized and internationalized culture in which we are living. Consequently, we must have the courage and awareness to contribute something original and local to the global culture.