Can Tragedies Transcend Borders?

Amy R. Wong explores Nan Z. Da’s “The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear.”

By Amy R. WongOctober 23, 2025

• History

• Literary Criticism

WE NEED King Lear to understand Chinese history, and we need Chinese history to understand King Lear. This is the bold, opening premise of literary scholar Nan Z. Da’s extraordinary new Princeton University Press book, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear. To claim up-front that Lear and modern China mutually illuminate one another—not only that Chairman Mao can be seen as a Lear-like figure whose era and its aftermath involved Lear-like tragedies, but also that Lear is Shakespeare’s most “Chinese” play—is almost to invite objection and misunderstanding right out of the gate. (See also: Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis of tyrannical psychology in Tudor texts and abuses of power in the present.) This is especially the case for a work appearing as the reactionary political climate in the United States is accompanied with a drumbeat of Sinophobia.

A project like this thus finds itself on the defensive even before it has had a chance to explain. Not unlike when Cordelia is asked to mend her speech after her fateful refusal to flatter her patriarch, the conditions are “infelicitous,” Da might say, for making such claims (“Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth,” says Cordelia, a moment Da reads as describing not only the character’s own unhappiness but also the conditions that bind her speech). But such infelicitous situations are child’s play, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear suggests, compared to the task of trying to tell an accurate story of what has happened to multiple generations of Chinese people under the shadow of Maoism. This is the task that Da sets out to accomplish, herself a Chinese diasporic subject born during the Deng Xiaoping era of “reform” and “opening up,” which began not long after Mao’s death in 1976, and of the one-child policy. Da argues that Lear is uniquely positioned to conceptualize this history, and the poorly understood patterns of moral psychology that it kicked off. In turn, she argues, Chinese history reveals the plausibility of Lear. (As Da notes in passing, Lear also inspired a recent novel by Canada-based Chinese writer Xue Yiwei: “Lierwang” yu 1979, or “King Lear and Nineteen Seventy-Nine,” which is not yet available in English. Xue’s work moves between Shakespeare and China in Mao’s time and after, additionally adapting Joyce’s Ulysses to explore a personal history set within a single year.)

In a book that weaves together memoir, history, historiography, and literary criticism, Da lays out what feels like a stunning legal case for Lear and China’s mutual illumination. Her equal facility at discussing the play, its historiography, Jacobean England, and nearly every decade of modern Chinese history—from early consolidations around Mao’s cult of personality during the Yan’an Rectification Movement (1942–45) to the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), and forward through Deng’s first year to Tiananmen (1989) and the current recapitulation of Chinese authoritarian power under Xi Jinping—renders The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear a work without scholarly precedent. Yet it is not quite accurate to characterize Da’s book as a legal case, because her method, as a literary critic, is to take us carefully through episodes that bear distinct formal similarities to one another without allowing those similarities to cohere into the generality of an argument. In showing us so much yet avoiding summation and final pronouncements, what Da wants, ultimately, is for us to discern for ourselves.

¤

Why is it so important that we discern for ourselves? The answer to this question is at the heart of Da’s preoccupation with authoritarian conditions in which “the personal becomes political, [and] the most flagrant crimes of the state are folded into dysfunctional family dynamics.” In both Lear and modern Chinese history, Da diagnoses a formal problem of narrative circularity, due to this collapse of the personal and political. If you focus too much on the tragedy of the family, you lose sight of how state power fuels and exploits personal intimacies, and vice versa. It is a problem, also, of incompatible genres rubbing up against each other: “Can history recover from betrayals between parents and children? Tragedy answers no.” In five chapters that riff on genre categories from the First Folio organization and beyond—“Tales,” “History,” “Tragedy,” “Comedy,” and “Romance”—Da suggests more broadly in her book that an adequate conceptualization of Chinese history and Lear alike will require a more promiscuous approach to genre: one that is willing to see beyond “problem plays” and problem histories.

What is the point of a history if you cannot recover from it? Da gives us a literary critic’s answer. Insofar as history results from a capacity to accurately parse causes and effects, it matters simply because of the exercising of that critical capacity. Attentive tracking—Did we notice that the Fool just disappears from the play? Did Cordelia mend her speech or not? Are things really bad yet, and if so, are they the worst? Do Edgar’s (or Albany’s, depending on the version of the play) final lines make any sense?—is the end point of Da’s critical endeavor: no more, no less. What Shakespeare’s Lear illuminates about China and China illuminates about Shakespeare’s Lear is that this kind of critical sensemaking may be the only recourse available under state authoritarianisms that become continuous with the wrongs of the family. Even if a history—however meticulous—cannot ensure recovery, that someone is tracking, with care, matters.

Drawing examples of intimate harm perpetuated between close associates not just from the Cultural Revolution but also from the earlier years of the Great Leap Forward (1958–62), Da shows us long-standing difficulties of securing acknowledgment when intimate betrayals became part of common, everyday life. In the Chinese context, it is not simply a case of victims not receiving acknowledgment for their suffering, but a case of difficulty adjudicating between victims and victimizers, and, relatedly, a case of distorted acknowledgment. “Unsecurable acknowledgment” produces exaggeration—a causal pattern that can be illustrated with a Learian state example. After Mao’s death, given the many reversals of victimization carried out during the course of the CCP’s history, and the varying intensities with which victims were persecuted, it would be near impossible to furnish proper acknowledgment. Without recourse to satisfying collective acknowledgment, acknowledgment was reduced too quickly to such spectacles as the Gang of Four’s show trial, or the enduring propaganda of Deng’s assessment of Mao: “70 percent right, 30 percent wrong.”

¤

A demand for filial piety in the form of exaggeration and flattery—love that must be expressed as propaganda—is what gets the tragedy of Lear going, and what gets the tragedy of Maoism going too. For generations of Lear’s readers, the opening scene of the play is the first outrageous instance of its overall improbability (according to literary scholar A. C. Bradley, something in the play’s “very essence […] is at war with the senses”). Why does Lear need a pro forma public proclamation from his daughters of their love if he already intends beforehand to divide the kingdom three ways? Why does Cordelia refuse to humor what could simply be an aging parent’s petulant bid for exaggeration? Why would Lear subsequently react so disproportionately out of hand as to disown Cordelia for her measured declaration of love and banish Kent for his reasonable plea for the king to “check [his] hideous rashness”? How does the intensity of the violence to follow get going so quickly after what seems, on the surface, like a mere ceremonial formality for a peaceful transfer of power?

Da explains that the confusion and incredulity that Lear tends to sow in its readers is due to the fact that it is a sparsely populated play that renders historical context noticeably absent and likely deliberately so—given that Shakespeare had access to plenty of source materials on the ancient Leir of Britain, including voguish contemporary chronicles and the play King Leir, which had been circulating onstage for at least a decade before Shakespeare completed his Lear. What this absence of history produces is a particular form of confusion that resembles problems of perception in the Chinese experience of Maoism and its wake. Without access to proper information, she argues, we feel that we cannot judge the proportions of a tragedy: both how bad things are and how bad they could get. Chinese history, consequently, can provide a riposte to confusion about Lear: this kind of tragedy can happen, and it can happen again.

As early as 1926, when the Nationalist (KMT) army launched its Northern Expedition to reunify China, patterns of flattery and purges were already being set in the fledgling Communist Party. In his essay published the same year, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Mao begins with a threat: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” Not long after, as KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek purged Communists in his “White Terror” campaign that began in 1927, Mao would carry out his own purges of intellectuals to consolidate “friends” and punish “enemies.”

How did Chinese history go from these early days of Maoism to the Learian tragedies of numerous families broken by “perverse love, gross flattery, silencing, schoolyard cruelty, and desolate deaths”? What might be Da’s most difficult-to-prove claim, at least to outsiders to this experience, is that the children who have lived in the aftermath of Maoism’s impact on parents and grandparents intuit continuity between state and familial cruelties, even if we cannot quite explain how it works. One of the only things that Da asks her readers to take on faith is that private scenes of Chinese family life—demands for exaggerated fealty and violent curses alike—became “the fabric of relationality itself” on account of the way Maoism created victims who could not secure the right form of acknowledgment. She writes:

Look gently inside the homes of some of your Chinese neighbors. […] You will see pleas that resemble “unsightly tricks” [Regan’s phrase for Lear’s begging after taking leave from Goneril], ugly insults that cannot be repeated. The curses hurled upon mean children and adults are extreme. They rival Lear’s curses for his own daughters […] Such verbal abuses betray an elemental resourcelessness.

It may sound like “psychobabble,” Da admits, but Chinese history offers a plausible explanation for a Learian psychic universe in which insecurity born of “unsecurable acknowledgment” spins out into vicious and petty everyday acts that are enough to unspool a “world-historical tragedy.”

¤

About a decade into the early purges within the Communist Party in the 1930s, my maternal grandmother traveled from Shanghai to Chongqing in hopes that she might win a place at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (Mao’s 1942 conference that established communist cultural doctrine). Like Goneril betting on exaggerated action and speech to gain the favor of the patriarch, she hoped that the right performance would be enough to cancel out the fact of her background as the daughter of landowners. She failed the background checks. Like Goneril too, she would come to regret marrying the wrong man: my grandfather, whose brother would actually make it to Yan’an and into the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party.

In my family’s history, there was a direct proximity to the origins of modern Chinese state power that connected tales of family dysfunction clearly enough to Maoism even before the Cultural Revolution. And yet, having been born in the United States and to a father who had left China for Hong Kong by the early 1950s, I failed to connect these circumstances to the strange “rhythms of childhood” that I share—at least in part—with Da, who spent the first six years of her life in China. It seems to me that one of the many vicissitudes of the Chinese diaspora—who suffer, among other things, difficulty in building community—is that distinctions like this, sometimes even small ones, can deeply alter one’s vantage point on world-historical events and the everyday patterns of one’s family life.

There is a lot in Da’s family history that renders her subjectivity an extraordinary one. Most notably, her maternal grandfather hails from a long line of Peking opera singers and even performed for the likes of Yuan Shikai, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao himself. Da draws on this artistic and literary heritage and, as well, a remarkable personal archive of her grandfather’s memoirs and paintings to develop keen observations of Western versus Eastern tragic form, their affordances and shortcomings each. Those who are looking, however, for a type of memoir that will satisfy a curiosity about a family’s “dirty laundry,” so to speak, or the triumphs of its extraordinary individuals, will be disappointed. The family history that deeply informs and drives Da’s book is shared with a judiciousness that formally befits Da’s desire to get things right and convey true stories without exaggeration.

In so doing, Da manages from a uniquely personal vantage point to unfurl possibilities for a different kind of collective history capacious enough to allow for distinct calibrations of tragic form. Calibration, of course, is everything when one is faced with Learian parents who are forced to settle for “children who did not call their bluff when they overexaggerated or pulled stunts for love, recognition, and witness.” Cordelia’s “half my love [and] half my care and duty” tries to restore balance, even if it may have already been too late to do so. Cordelia, too, may have been at the “tail end” of a Maoist history. As Da observes, it’s a play that feels like an “aftermath, a conclusion with a hidden history,” a sense she clocks as uncannily similar to how she felt as a child. In 1942, it may have already been too late for Wang Shiwei, the literary critic who dared challenge the Communist Party’s early hypocrisies at Yan’an in hopes of restoring balance to the revolution to come.

The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear is dedicated to the executed Wang Shiwei, whose remains were found at the bottom of a well in 1947. Da carries on his legacy in her faith in literary criticism, which she calls “the deepest romance of [her] life.” Here, it sounds like she risks losing her calibration—if one is not reading carefully enough. For Da, “romance” takes the form of simplehearted loyalty that any ordinary person might have: a young Red Guard taking the train to see Mao in Beijing, Kent trying his best to work for good, Lear and Cordelia both refusing to capitulate to one another, a Chinese daughter remaining unwilling to let go of the belief “that she can figure it out for herself, sift irreparable damages from reparative ones, rescue love from nastiness.”

My late father once wrote to me with a different view: “In life there are always past circumstances and personal choices that later prove to be detrimental. I hope you know the appropriate way to deal with these is to put all emphasis on the present and the future.” He may be right, in that such sifting is not going to change the past, nor is it likely to determine different outcomes for the future. But I find that I want to go over things again and again, to try to find the right proportions for saying what happened. This is why Da says that Edgar’s (or Albany’s) final speech, though bad in its seemingly unintended contradictions and vague sensemaking, is also (pedagogically) good. The ability to go over things with care and attention matters, she believes, especially when one might be living through another historical moment that makes it hard to think and speak with accuracy.

Elsewhere, though, she acknowledges that this not letting go—the literary critic’s drive to get it right even when it cannot be gotten right—is not going to end the cycle of this kind of tragedy. Here again, she is giving things in proportion: literature—even really good literature—is not going to save us from history repeating itself. But it might let us keep our minds for ourselves. I find I am moved by Da’s self-avowed “bluff” that, even in times when the fools have disappeared, it will have mattered that someone somewhere was paying close attention, offstage. For me, to encounter Da’s work as a contemporary of hers and a daughter of the Chinese diaspora is nothing short of receiving an unexpectedly belated gift of solidarity that I did not know was possible to receive at this stage of my own life. May it be a gift, as well, for thinking people everywhere amid the muddles of our own political present.