Flowers and Stamens Floating on the Waves: A Tale of Diaspora by Zhang Ailing

In 1952 Zhang Ailing left Shanghai permanently, moving first to Hong Kong and then, in 1955, to the United States. In her works there are almost no traces of these certainly painful moments of transition and she never explicitly spoke about her diasporic experience, not even in her posthumous works written in the States. However, hints on these crucial departures appear in the short story Flowers and stamens floating on the waves (浮花浪蕊), written in the Fifties but published only in 1983 in Notes of bewilderment (惘然记), after a thirty year long revision. In the preface to the collection, Zhang expresses a strong attachment to this story, quite different from her previous works and much overlooked by critics. Flowers is an obscure tale of travel with no clear destination, which keeps on moving back and forth between the ship on which the protagonist is sailing, and memories of Hong Kong, Shanghai and of the liminal space between borders. Interspersed with an impressive amount of quotations from the West, the winding itinerary of this physical and mental journey is reflected in a meandering, multi-layered and fragmentary narrative structure which sometime even puzzles the reader for its lack of coherence. In my contribution, I intend to demonstrate, through a textual analysis mainly focussing on the peculiar representation of space and the complex manipulation of time, how this story mirrors the author’s new diasporic state of mind.