Published in 1986, one of Wang Anyi’s earliest books consists of the journals that she and her mother, Ru Zhijuan, kept during their stay at the Iowa International Writing Program in Fall of 1983. This essay uses Wang Anyi’s relationship with her mother as an entry point into a broader consideration of Wang Anyi’s oeuvre, arguing that Wang explores this relationship in a displaced manner in several of her subsequent works, in which she repeatedly characterizes both her mother and herself (and their respective fictional stand-ins) as figurative orphans. I propose that this “orphan” trope also offers a useful metaphor for understanding the metatextual turn that Wang’s literary efforts began to take a few years after she attended the Iowa International Writing Program.

中文翻译：

---

母女：作为方法的孤儿院

1986 年出版，王安忆最早的著作之一是她和她的母亲茹志娟 1983 年秋季在爱荷华州国际写作项目期间留下的日记。本文以王安忆与母亲的关系为词条对王安忆的作品进行更广泛的考虑，认为王安怡在她随后的几部作品中以一种错位的方式探索了这种关系，在这些作品中，她反复将她的母亲和她自己（以及他们各自虚构的替身）描绘成具象的孤儿。我认为这个“孤儿”比喻也提供了一个有用的比喻，可以帮助理解王在参加爱荷华州国际写作计划后几年开始的文学努力的元文本转向。