Huang Ya’s Wisteria and the Cold War middlebrow: melodrama, Manichean worlds, and Mahua literature

Abstract

As the longest-serving editor of the literary magazine Chao Foon, Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) writer Huang Ya (1932–1992) is widely regarded as a central figure in shaping Mahua modernism during the 1960s. Existing scholarship has largely focused on his editorial advocacy for Malayanisation and modern Mahua literature within a Cold War framework, while less attention has been paid to his fiction, which draws more heavily on melodramatic than modernist aesthetics. This article examines Huang’s best-selling romance Wisteria (1960) through the lens of the “Cold War middlebrow,” understood here as a contingent literary formation that served sociocultural, sentimental, and pedagogical functions during a period of polarised ideologies. By analysing Wisteria’s adaptation of the melodramatic mode for a local readership, this article offers a reassessment of what constitutes the “popular” in Mahua literature, showing how Huang’s fiction engaged questions of taste, value, and affect within a rapidly changing decolonising milieu. Through the subversion of melodrama’s Manichean binaries and the reconfiguration of the relationship between modernism and the middlebrow, Huang demonstrates a self-conscious effort to balance accessibility with aesthetic ambition. Situating Wisteria within the intersecting contexts of Cold War cultural politics and inter-Asian literary networks connecting Hong Kong and Malaya, this article highlights how popular Mahua literature participated in the circulation of cultural influences and the forging of new national identities, thereby expanding critical understandings of both “literary value” and the “popular” within the Mahua canon.