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 | | Mao Dun, the avowed leftist writer and an early member of the Chinese Communist Party, inscribes a "contradictory" message even on the very first page of his first novel, Midnight [Ziye], subtitled, A Romance of China, 1930. |
 | | They are, in short, emblems of China's passage to modernity to which Mao Dun and other urban writers of his generation reacted with a great deal of ambivalence and anxiety. |
 | | After all, the English word "modern" (and the French "moderne") received its first Chinese transliteration in Shanghai itself: In popular parlance, the Chinese word modeng has the meaning of being "novel and/or fashionable," according to the authoritative Chinese dictionary, Cihai. |
| www.32bny.org /past/issue_fivesix/articles/lee.html (2134 words) |
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