uncorrupted original state. Yu Jian’s use of regional language is
actually singular—the examples are all from the Yunnan regional
language with which he is most familiar, but this does not prevent him
from lauding a region-based colloquial writing in general:
Colloquial writing is in fact to restore a worldly tendency that links
tradition with the Putonghua-centric contemporary Chinese language.
It softens the language which, because of its past focus on ideological
struggles, has become stiffened and belligerent and therefore unfit to
express the experiences of spontaneity, temperament, mediocrity,
softness, concreteness, quotidian in mundane living; it means to
restore the language’s relations with things and ordinary senses.
Colloquial writing enriches the Chinese language’s textures, giving it
back the qualities of humor, gentleness, this-worldliness, and transitivity.
It rediscovers the connection with a corporeal language excelling at
describing eat drink man woman in life’s routines that were common
in Song poetry and the fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties.
(Yu 1999: 463)Yu Jian’s passion and eloquence are evident in this remarkable passage.
One can hardly fault him for unabashedly advocating colloquial
writing, for it has been the path of development for modern Chinese
literature. The remaining question is about language resources for
colloquial writing. The May Fourth generation of writers invented a
new literature that used the vernacular and rejected classical Chinese,
and now Yu Jian wants to rediscover the vernacular in regional
languages. There is no doubt that Putonghua is deeply embedded with
all sorts of traces that could be deemed “official” and “foreign”—if
Maoist discourse is only temporary and has since dwindled into a faint
echo, the Europeanization of the modern Chinese language was a
formative force at the very beginning and has all the signs of becoming
even greater today. Indeed the very existence of Putonghua gives life to
dialects. In addition, they do form a binary pair that validates Yu Jian’s
minjian poetics: in relation to Putonghua’s unshakable centralized
position—which, as Yu Jian rightly points out, has profound implica-
tions for the Chinese mind about culture, ideology, and geopolitics—
regional languages survive on the margins, representing a pristine
aesthetic space that the minjianpoet is seeking. However, if Putonghua
opposes dialects, does that automatically make it oppose the vernacu-
lar and the colloquial? Are both the spoken word and the written word
not part of Putonghua? For that matter, is it not true that any major
living language, official or otherwise, always contains elements
commonly considered colloquial and written? The real valid question is
196 Dian Li