“Two Women of China—Mulberry and Peach” by Hualing Nieh (post 2): Author says she used multiple personality to dramatize immigrant experience

This edition of the novel, which includes an interview with the author in its Appendix, is a 1981 translation of its original 1976 Chinese edition. The author interview suggests that the protagonist’s “schizophrenic character” is  employed as a vehicle to dramatize the Chinese immigrant experience. The author’s misnaming of multiple personality as schizophrenia suggests either that she felt she knew enough about multiple personality without researching it or that adequate research resources were not immediately available.

Toward the end of the story, Peach (the alternate personality) tells Mulberry about the time when she, Peach, for the most part, took over. Peach has to explain things to Mulberry, because Mulberry, the regular, host personality, has memory gaps:

“You were dead [figuratively speaking], Mulberry. I have come to life. I’ve been alive all along. But now I have broken free. You don’t know me, but I know you. I’m completely different from you. We are temporarily inhabiting the same body. How unfortunate. We often do the opposite things. And if we do the same thing, our reasons are different…Sometimes you are stronger; sometime I am. When I’m stronger I can make you do things you don’t want to do…(1, pp. 223-224).

“Mulberry, I’m glad I’m the one who came to New York, not you. I’m having a wonderful time. I’ll be certain to write down everything that happens. If you show up by chance, you will know what’s been happening. Look, I’ll cooperate with you if you won’t spoil all the fun” (1, p. 230).

I have no way of knowing whether this author had multiple personality or was merely using it as a metaphor to dramatize the immigrant experience. That’s why I don’t like to read novels with explicit multiple personality. Unless you have clear biographical evidence of multiple personality, it is only when works of fiction include symptoms of multiple personality that are inadvertent and gratuitous, or, at least, unacknowledged, that it is fair to make inferences. [Added May 27] However, the Chinese immigrant experience was so personally meaningful to the author, I wonder why she would structure her whole story about that around multiple personality unless that were also personally meaningful.

1. Hualing Nieh. Two Women of China—Mulberry and Peach [1976]. Translated by Jane Parish Yang with Linda Lappin. Beijing, New World Press, 1981.