Migrations—A Feather

“Migrations—A Feather” is one of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s recent works of fiction and her most experimental so far. Although the people and their experience depicted in this piece are fictional, they are based on historical events. Zheng yokes together two great migrations in China—one which lasted more than a century from 1671 to 1776, the other presently underway since the mid-1980s. In reconstructing the historical records of a clan’s chronicles, and fictionalizing the narrator, Zheng breaks away from traditional narrative strategies by leaving out the “story” and “characters” and emulates in part an idiosyncratically succinct classical Chinese style for narrating the two migrations on route, interlacing through juxtapositions their two movements in opposite directions, separated by more than two hundred years, yet linked by clan lineage. She employs distinctive styles and voices to depict drastically different experiences of the two migrations, and explores new possibilities of language and images to capture the speaker’s experience, thoughts, feelings, and imaginings shaped by dehumanizing environments of the factory, capitalism, and market economy. As she pushes the boundaries of literary genres, her magical, surrealistic images and poetic language enact resistance to oppressive systems and forces, in a manner distinct from her earlier works. Moreover, this historical fiction is also about life, death, time, history, imagination, and transformation. The transformation here is more than dehumanization and environmental degradation by industry and capitalism. It is taking place in the migrants’ ways of living, thinking, and feeling, as embodied by Zheng’s innovative use of form, images, and language, which suggest new ways of writing fiction by crossing boundaries of genres.