About Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, What I Want to Say to the Reader

A translation of Lin Yi-Han’s May 2017 talk on her novel

A lot of people after reading will say this is a story about girls getting seduced or raped; summing this book up in one sentence is improper, but if you forced me to change that sentence, I would say this is a story about a girl growing to love her rapist. That sentence has the word “love” in it, and we can say, Si-Chi¹ is fated to walk towards ruin without turning back precisely because in her heart she has tenderness, desires, love, and to the end in her heart she has sex. So this is certainly not a book of anger, nor a book intended to serve as an indictment. But today I don’t want to talk about “seduction” and “rape,” because anyone who reads this book, and doesn’t see seduction and rape, is playing deaf and dumb.

So today I came to talk about a larger topic. When you’re watching the news, when you see “victims” and “perpetrators,” those minutely detailed dialogues, the wallpaper patterns of small motels and apartments, the really lurid details, there’s no way you keep going, but today reading this novel you do keep going. Why? Because you found some aesthetic pleasure in the book — a feeling of pain and pleasure (the word literally fuses pain 痛 and pleasure 快). Let me misuse a Confucian saying, “knowing it cannot be done, yet doing it anyway” (知其不可為而為之),² where you know you shouldn’t read, but you keep reading on. This aesthetic joy is what I came to talk about today.

Chekhov has a story called “The Man in a Case”.³ Outside of the main character’s raincoat is a case; surrounding his bag is a case; everything with its own case. Even cases have their own cases. My story is about a case within a case.⁴

Let me first talk about the inside frame. The inside frame exists as the character of Lee Guo-Hua. Lee Guo-Hua, by virtue of being a novel character, in real life has a model. This model is a teacher I know. Maybe people were able to tell this real-life teacher has an original form, and maybe people thought, the original form here is Hu Lancheng. So, Lee Guo-Hua is a reduced — and then reduced again — counterfeit of Hu Lancheng. The model for Lee Guo-Hua’s model is Hu Lancheng. What I want to ask is, all students of Chinese — including me, including Hu Lancheng, including Lee Guo-Hua, we all know that “a person’s word is faith”.⁵ Today I didn’t even talk about the ‘great man’ 大丈夫, ‘benevolence’ 仁, ‘righteousness’ 義, ‘writing as transmitting the Way’ 文以載道, ‘writing as illuminating the Way’ 文以明道, ‘starving his flesh and emptying his body’, ‘the flood-like qi’.⁶ None of these; what I want to talk about instead is small feelings and small loves; what I want to talk about is the tradition of the Shijing before its love poems were over-interpreted and misread by later scholars as political poems. We all know, “In the heart it is intent; uttered in words it is poetry”, “Poetry springs from feeling and is sensuously ornate”, and Confucius’ “The three hundred Odes can be summed up in one phrase: ‘thoughts without depravity.’”⁷ These students of Chinese, Hu Lancheng and Lee Guo-Hua, why, as we know, when one speaks poetry about feelings—when one speaks words about feelings—his words should come from the heart; this person has “will” 志 and “feeling” 情, “his thoughts should not be depraved” 思無邪. So the thing that pains me here is, someone who truly trusts Chinese, how can he betray this vast and surging linguistic context spanning over five thousand years? The question I want to ask is this one.

Lee Guo-Hua has lines, his “love talk”, where because the reader already sees him through a tinted lens and knows that he is a “criminal” they think that he is disgusting, but some of these lines, if you look at them alone, you might think they are beautiful (note that I’m using the word beautiful), he has some lines that are highly artistic, and has some lines where you can imagine if it were Mao-Mao speaking to Iwen that the lines would be moving. If you imagine Mao-Mao saying to Iwen, “This is all your fault, you’re too beautiful,” or if you imagine him saying to her, “Obviously I need an excuse; without one, what’s between us couldn’t survive, right?” or “You’re Cao’s robes wet with water, and I’m Wu’s sashes in the wind”,⁸ or “In love, I am an unrecognized talent”, these words are truly beautiful. What I want to say is, people like Hu Lancheng or Lee Guo-Hua, you can say that their systems of thinking are deformed; they raped, or sexually abused, others; and yet think to themselves, “all is harmony, and that too is good”.⁹ You can say that their systems of thinking are warped, but can you say that their systems of thinking are not exquisite, or if not that, not beautiful? Hu Lancheng said of himself that he is both laughable and detestable,¹⁰ because his systems of thought are so contradictory, so much so that there’s nothing that isn’t included, because he is so so narcissistic, and has infinite tolerance for himself. This worldview obviously has many cracks and what can be used to fix these cracks? Language, rhetoric, all types of metaphor, and so much so that this worldview in the end becomes indestructible.

I’ll read a paragraph from This Life, These Times [by Hu Lancheng] where he says,

I already have Eileen [Chang], but I also took up with Xiaozhou, and then with Xiumei. Whether this was right or wrong, I could only decline to look too closely. I could not even think further about it. In any case that is how it is. It cannot be explained, and that itself is how it is. ‘Among stars there are good stars, among rains there are good rains’; in the human world too, among principles there are good principles. Such a good principle is what Mencius called righteousness, and since it can also be flirted with, righteousness becomes benevolence.¹¹

So you see, we know he raped Xiaozhou, failed Eileen, but in his mind he slips out of this frame; what we thought of as the thousand-times-tempered sincerity that a man of letters should have, in the end just returns to base desires.¹²

So what I want to ask here is not even whether art can or can’t be dishonest. Don’t ask Si-Chi if she does or doesn’t have love, because of course she does. I even think that Lee Guo-Hua in some points has love, but he doesn’t love Cookie or Hsiao-Chi (girls he previously raped), or Si-Chi, these little girls; what he loves is his performance, the context, the scene, the picture.

So with precisely the character of Lee Guo-Hua, I want to ask: can art have elements of ‘artful words and a pleasing face’ 巧言令色?¹³ I will always remember the time I found out [V.S.] Naipaul beat his wife.¹⁴ How my heart hurt. I’m a person with a superstitious faith in language and could not believe that someone who could produce an impeccable collection of fables could beat his wife. I later read Edward Said’s Orientalism, which refers to Naipaul as an Orientalist; later, I read Said’s autobiography and other people’s books. Other people mentioned Said, and said that he was a two-faced hypocrite.¹⁵ Just like peeling an onion back layer by later — you cannot trust anyone’s writing and character; it feels as though nothing in the world can be trusted.

We can reverse the question from before and ask as my second question: Is it true that art in nature contains “artful words and a pleasing face” 巧言令色? “Art” is constantly producing new forms, like playing with a cat’s cradle you have all sorts of transformations, all sorts of transmutations, but these techniques — are they nothing more than ‘artful words and a pleasing face” 巧言令色?

This is the inside frame. The outside frame is: as a novelist, this story tortured me, it ruined my life. But for many years, I practiced writing, grinding and polishing my pen; in the process of composition, I very consciously, lucidly wanted to reach a so-called artistic height.

My aesthetics include the idea that form and content are inseparable, or using André Gide’s words, expression and existence are inseparable (note that Gide said content is existence).¹⁶ In this story, the author often deliberately misuses allusions, or in diction often uses words’ divergent/secondary meanings; in the book there is a girl Fang Si-Chi, infatuated with literature and who is infatuated with literarature and yet still cannot fully digesting what she is reading¹⁷ — these two are one and the same.

I’m not saying anything grand here; I think that my prose is fallen, it isn’t anything like Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal “she become very low, [low into the dust,] and out of the dust a flower bloomed.”¹⁸ It’s definitely not like that. We all know the phrase “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” [Theodor Adorno, 1949].¹⁹ My psychiatrist, after knowing me for several years, said: you are a person who has gone through the Vietnam War. Then, after a few more years, he said: you are a person who has gone through a concentration camp. Even later, he said: you are someone who has gone through an atomic bombing. Primo Levi once said, Concentration camps are the largest-scale massacres in human history.²⁰ But I want to say, no, the worst massacre in humanity’s history is Si-Chi-style rape. When writing this book I looked down on myself. When people emerged from the concentration camps, survivors, when writing books, they often hoped that humankind would never again do that; but writing this book, I am certain, not even talking of the world, but Taiwan, that this will continue to happen, now, this moment, it is happening. When writing I hated myself a little, and had a feeling of humiliation. I think that my book is a book of humiliation. For this humiliation, I would like to import J. M. Coetzee’s “disgrace”;²¹ using the words of Si-Chi, Yi-Ting, and Iwen, this is unrefined writing, inelegant writing, and to misuse the Confucianism from above, this is writing that knows it cannot be done and does it anyway, because violence of this mass cannot be represented.

This story can actually be described in two to three sentences, graphically and explicitly. In two to three brutal sentences it can be said; it is, “There is a teacher who for years uses his authority to seduce, rape, and sexually abuse his female students.” Two or three simple sentences, and yet I used a fine brush, perhaps too fine a brush, to depict it. I don’t want to do reportage.²² I don’t have the intention or power to change society, and don’t want to be connected with those “big” words, and don’t want to connect with structure. Here, in this frame/taozi, I want to ask: as a writer — what is this perverted, writerly, artistic desire of mine? What, at the bottom of it all, is this desire that is called ‘art’? I often say to readers, when you feel pain as you read, that is real. But I want to say more: when you feel beauty as you read, that too is real, and it is constructed entirely out of words and rhetoric. This is the question I want to ask.

My conclusion is, I once was seriously obsessed with Eileen Chang, and no matter how much I hate Hu Lancheng, I still must admit, the chapter in This Life, These Times, “A Woman of the Republican Era,”²³ is one of the most thorough essays about Eileen Chang of all time. My whole novel, from Lee Guo-Hua to the act of writing itself, is just a big act of sophistry, a big interrogation of the artistic concept of the true, the good, the beautiful. I want to use one sentence to close. Yi-Ting, recounting the whole story of the building,²⁴ thinks, “it was not those who studied literature, but literature itself, that had failed them.”²⁵

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Translated from Lin Yi-Han, 【逐字稿】「這是關於《房思琪的初戀樂園》這部作品，我想對讀者說的事情。」, published by Readmoo 閱讀最前線 on 5 May 2017: original link (archived copy).

Footnotes

1. Names of characters from the novel follow Jenna Tang’s English translation, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise (HarperVia, 2024): Fang Si-Chi 房思琪, Liu Yi-Ting 劉怡婷, Lee Guo-Hua 李國華, Hsu Iwen 許伊紋, Mao-Mao 毛毛, Cookie 餅乾, and Guo Hsiao-Chi 郭曉奇. Tang deliberately avoided standard pinyin (hence Si-Chi rather than Siqi, Lee rather than Li), and spelled 伊紋 as “Iwen” to set her apart from her abusive husband Yi-Wei 一維; see her interview with Electric Literature. The author’s name is likewise given as Lin Yi-Han, as on the English edition. People outside the novel (Hu Lancheng 胡蘭成, Eileen Chang 張愛玲, Xiaozhou 小周, Xiumei 秀美) are in pinyin or their conventional English names.

2. Analects 14.38 (憲問): a gatekeeper asks of Confucius, 「是知其不可而為之者與？」 “Is he the one who knows it cannot be done and does it anyway?” (Wikisource). Lin quotes the phrase in its popular form 知其不可為而為之. She calls this a “misuse” because the original describes Confucius’s dogged political mission, not a reader’s guilty pleasure.

3. Anton Chekhov, «Человек в футляре» (1898), 套中人 in Chinese. In Constance Garnett’s translation it appears as “The Man in a Case” in The Wife and Other Stories (1918), available on Project Gutenberg; Russian text on Wikisource.

4. The word here, 套子 (taozi), can mean layer, or case, or cover, or frame. I will use frame and case interchangeably depending on what flows better in English. Lin’s phrase is 套中套, “a case within a case,” which echoes the Chinese title of Chekhov’s story.

5. This is meant literally in Chinese, as ‘person’ 人/亻 + ‘word’ 言 is ‘faith’ 信. The gloss goes back to the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字: 「信，誠也。从人从言。」 “Xin means sincerity; it is composed of ‘person’ and ‘word’” (Wikisource).

6. A run of Confucian commonplaces. 大丈夫, the “great man,” is from Mencius 3B:2 (滕文公下). 文以載道, “writing as a vehicle for the Way,” comes from Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤, Tongshu 通書, 文辭: 「文所以載道也」 (Wikisource); 文以明道, “writing to illuminate the Way,” from Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元, 答韋中立論師道書: 「文者以明道」 (Wikisource). 餓其體膚，空乏其身, “starves his flesh and empties his body,” is Mencius 6B:15, the famous 天將降大任於是人也 passage (告子下). 浩然之氣, the “flood-like qi,” is Mencius 2A:2 (公孫丑上); Lin actually says 浩然正氣, the everyday variant. A helpful essay on the Mencius passages is here.

7. Three foundational statements of Chinese poetics. 「在心為志，發言為詩」 is from the Great Preface to the Book of Odes (毛詩序): 「詩者，志之所之也，在心為志，發言為詩」 (Wikisource, 毛詩正義 卷一), which itself builds on 「詩言志」 in the Book of Documents (舜典). 「詩緣情而綺靡」 is from Lu Ji 陸機’s Rhapsody on Literature 文賦 (Wikisource). 「詩三百，一言以蔽之，曰思無邪」 is Analects 2.2 (為政).

8. Cao Zhongda 曹仲達 (Northern Qi) painted clothes clinging as if wet; Wu Daozi 吳道子 (Tang) painted sashes billowing in the wind. The tag comes from Guo Ruoxu 郭若虛’s Tuhua jianwen zhi 圖畫見聞誌 (11th c.), 卷一 論曹吳體法: 「吳之筆，其勢圓轉，而衣服飄舉；曹之筆，其體稠疊，而衣服緊窄。故後輩稱之曰：『吳帶當風，曹衣出水』」 (Wikisource). In the book Lee Guo-Hua says 曹衣帶水，吳帶當風, though the first half should actually read 曹衣出水; this is one of the deliberate misquotations Lin discusses below.

9. 「一團和氣，亦是好的」. “That too is good” (亦是好的) is Hu Lancheng’s verbal tic, the phrase with which he smooths over anything; Eileen Chang parodies it in Little Reunions 小團圓 through the Hu-figure Shao Zhiyong 邵之雍. I could not find this exact sentence in This Life, These Times, so it is probably Lin’s pastiche of his manner rather than a quotation.

10. Hu says this of himself more than once in This Life, These Times: in the chapter 風花啼鳥, 「我年輕時的想頭與行事，諸般可笑可惡」 (“my thoughts and deeds when young were laughable and detestable in every way”), and in 路入南中, 「但是我這個人也著實可惡又可笑」 (“but I really am a detestable and laughable person”).

11. From the chapter 十八相送 of Hu Lancheng’s This Life, These Times 今生今世 (1959). In the edition I consulted the passage reads: 「我已有愛玲，卻又與小周，又與秀美，是應該還是不應該，我只能不求甚解，甚至不去多想，總之它是這樣的，不可以解說，這就是理了。洪範裏，「星有好星，雨有好雨」，人世的事，亦理有好理，比所謂科學的精神更清潔無邪祟，且亦比秦始皇帝詔書裏的更有男女貞良，道理顯白，制度衡量，莫不如畫的人世。這樣好的理即是孟子說的義，而它又是可以被調戲的，則義又是仁了。」 Hu is citing the Book of Documents, 洪範 (Great Plan): 「庶民惟星，星有好風，星有好雨」 (Wikisource), where 好 is the verb “to favor,” meaning roughly “some stars favor wind, some stars favor rain,” an astrological remark about the moon’s passage through certain lodges. Hu (not Lin) garbles the line into 「星有好星，雨有好雨」 and treats 好 as the adjective “good,” which lets him manufacture a “good principle” for keeping three women at once. This Zhihu thread was helpful in untangling the original line and Hu’s misuse. Lin reads the passage nearly verbatim but skips the clause from 比所謂科學的精神 to 莫不如畫的人世, and the transcript has 人世的世 for Hu’s 人世的事 (a homophone).

12. 食色性也, “appetite and sex are human nature,” which Lin invokes here with 回歸只不過是食色性也. The line is Mencius 6A:4, but it is spoken by Mencius’s opponent Gaozi 告子: 「告子曰：食、色，性也。」 (告子上).

13. Analects 1.3 (學而): 「巧言令色，鮮矣仁。」 “Artful words and a pleasing face are seldom benevolent” (Wikisource).

14. Patrick French’s authorized biography, The World Is What It Is (Knopf, 2008), records Naipaul’s own admission that he beat his long-time mistress Margaret Gooding, and his cruelty toward his wife Pat Naipaul. Lin says “his wife” (妻子); the physical violence French documents was directed at Gooding.

15. Edward Said, Orientalism (1978). Said’s attacks on Naipaul are mostly elsewhere: “Bitter Dispatches from the Third World” (The Nation, 1980, collected in Reflections on Exile), “Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World” (Salmagundi, 1986), and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Said’s memoir is Out of Place (1999). The charge of hypocrisy Lin has in mind is likely Justus Reid Weiner, “‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” Commentary, September 1999, which accused Said of inventing parts of his Jerusalem childhood; Said and others disputed it.

16. Lin: 「或者用安德烈紀德的話，表現與存在是不可分開的，請注意紀德說內容是存在。」 I could not locate the passage in Gide she is paraphrasing.

17. Literally, she is at the stage of “eating jujubes whole, pit included” 囫圇吞棗, the idiom for swallowing what one reads without digesting it.

18. In the talk Lin says 變得很低很低，然後從塵埃中開出花來 and attaches it to Baudelaire, but the line is Eileen Chang’s own about Hu Lancheng, written on the back of a photograph she gave him and preserved in the 民國女子 chapter of This Life, These Times: 「見了他，她變得很低很低，低到塵埃裏，但她心裏是歡喜的，從塵埃裏開出花來。」 “Meeting him, she became very low, low into the dust, but her heart was glad, and out of the dust a flower bloomed.”

19. Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” written 1949 and published 1951: „nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch.“ In English in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (MIT Press, 1981), p. 34.

20. 「集中營是人類歷史上最大規模的屠殺」. I could not find this sentence in Primo Levi’s writings; it may be a loose recollection of If This Is a Man or The Drowned and the Saved.

21. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999); the Chinese title is 屈辱, the same word Lin uses for “humiliation” here.

22. 報導文學, “reportage literature,” a Chinese tradition descended from the European reportage of Egon Erwin Kisch and the Soviet ocherk; see Charles A. Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Duke University Press, 2002).

23. 民國女子, the chapter of 今生今世 devoted to Eileen Chang.

24. The apartment building in which the novel takes place.

25. 「她恍然覺得不是學文學的人，而是文學辜負了她們。」 The rendering here is my own; I have not checked it against Jenna Tang’s translation.