The Village Road Takes Me Home (1983)

Tie Ning is critical of the masculinity model for grounding subjectivity on opposition to the power of the party/state and assuming responsibility over women's lives. This model is concretized in two male characters who both want to marry the female protagonist because they feel responsible for her earlier marriage to a peasant, which left her a widow and prevented her from returning to the city after the policy of sending educated youths to rural China ended.

In her story of the female protagonist's choice between the two, which entails the significant and ideologically loaded choice between the city and the countryside, Tie Ning reveals the complicity of the masculinity model of subjectivity in the party/state's dominant ideology despite its apparent oppositional stance. In its place, she offers the protagonist's feminine understanding of subjectivity as determining one's life-course based on one's own needs, desires, and abilities rather than with reference to-either in opposition or compliance-the party-state and its ideology.

 How Long isForever (1999)

Bai Daxing is a typical girl brought up in Beijing's Hutongs. She is a kind girl who is always willing to offer help to everybody around her without any consideration of her own interests. But the innocent Bai is cheated once and again by the friends who have received her help, and even her whole heart. The people she trusts most are making use of her purity and warm-heartedness, which leaves Bai with less and less… Bai's personality does not seem to be in accordance with the times. Tie uses Bai to emphasize how far a modern society is from forever.

 Da Yu Nv (2000)

Yin Xiaotiao is a middle-aged woman. Yin's mother loves another man and abandons the family when she's young. And Yin's younger sister is more like her competitor rather than a close family member. Her lover, a big film star is found to be a selfish person who knows nothing but his own interests…

Tie puts a microscope on the leading character, through which readers get a clear picture of a middle-aged woman with nonstop miserable experiences. Through Yin's life Tie reexamines relationships like friendship, love and relationships

Author: Lywet

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