Zhang Ai Ling's Words to Live By

生命是一袭华美的袍子，里面爬满了虱子. For those readers who are interested, the pinyin and tones of this quote, as well as the other characters in this post, are for the most part listed below the main text body.

The gist of this quotation from Zhang Ai Ling (张爱玲) (see the two photos above) is as follows: “Life on the outside appears to be a bright and beautiful gown, but this gown is really crawling with lice.” While this is certainly not a cheery view of human existence, one can't really blame Zhang, who was one of China's greatest 20th century novelists, for uttering such sentiments. Her life was very much like a gown that from a distance appears to be beautiful, but when looked at closely is really crawling with lice.

Zhang was born in 1920 in Shanghai into a famous aristocratic family. Her grandfather, Zhang Peilun, was the son-in-law of the 1ate-19th Century statesman and high ranking Qing Dynasty official, Li Hongzhan. But while Zhang's childhood material circumstances were good enough, saying that her relations with her parents were “troubled” would be massively understating things.

When Zhang was five her father took in a concubine and then quickly became addicted to opium. Her mother reacted by leaving the family to tour Europe for four years. Despite having bound feet, she was one of the first Chinese women to ski in the Alps. She returned only after her husband promised to quit smoking opium and throw out of the concubine; however, the two divorced in 1930.

Zhang's father then married his concubine. Zhang did not get along with her step mother, and her father, who was a violent patriarch, beat and imprisoned his daughter for six months when she 18 over some perceived minor slight to his second wife.

Even at a young age, Zhang displayed considerable literary talent, and her writing provided an escape from her unhappy childhood. She was also intensely ambitious, declaring in 1944, “To be famous, I must hurry. If it comes too late, it will not bring me much happiness … Hurry, hurry, or it will be too late, too late!”

Zhang didn't have to worry. She became famous overnight in 1944 when her first writing, which was penned in 1943-1944, was published. Much of her most famous work, including “Love in a Fallen City” (倾城之恋) and “The Golden Cangue” (金锁记), were written during this first burst of creativity. The first edition of her collected short stories sold out in four days after it was published in 1944.

Zhang's early writing established her as the most important literary chronicler of life in 1940s Shanghai. Her stories focused on men and women struggling to deal with the day-to-day dislocations brought on by war and modernization. For example, in the short story, “Sealed Off,” two Shanghai strangers, an unhappily married man and a lonely single woman taking a tram, are drawn into a dreamlike conversation as their car is being searched by Japanese troops.

The Taiwanese film director, Li An (李安), whose previous films include “Brokeback Mountain” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” has recently sparked a revival of interest in Zhang Ai Ling with his film adaptation of one her most famous short novellas, “Lust, Caution” (色戒).

In this story, a young college student, played by the beautiful Tang Wei (汤唯), is sent by an anti-Japanese resistance group to seduce a top official in the collaborationist Chinese Government so he can be assassinated. However, it is the student who winds up being seduced by the official, played with reptilian charm by the still very dashing Liang Chao Wei (梁朝伟). At the end of the story, in a self-destructive change of heart, the student warns her prey of his imminent danger, thereby allowing him to narrowly escape the trap that has been set for him and dooming herself and her comrades.

The story 色戒 illustrates another notable feature of Zhang's work, namely the extreme economy of her prose. Zhang uses no more 15,000 characters to write an intensely atmospheric and tautly plotted espionage story that morphs into an erotically charged story of seduction. The novella, which has been reprinted by Penguin Books, is a mere 33 pages long.

Indeed, in contrast to most film adaptations, Li An actually added material to the literary work on which his film was based. For example, the very disturbing scene in which the student follows her prey into a Japanese military brothel and sings to him in a private room does not appear in Zhang's novella.

I think that Li An's film is certainly a terrific adaptation of 色戒. In particular, it depicts very well the sinister and harsh atmosphere of the collaborator’s villa, together with his grasping wife (brilliantly portrayed by Joan Chen) and mahjong (麻将) playing female friends.

But one thing the film doesn't convey, that is captured in Zhang's prose, is the collaborator's warped sense of triumph after the assassination plot is foiled and his temptress turned mistress and her friends have been executed. Zhang chillingly writes:

“He was not optimistic about the way the war was going, and had no idea how it would turn out for him. But now that he had enjoyed the love of a beautiful woman, he could die happy—without regret. He could feel her shadow forever near him, comforting him. Even though she had hated him at the end, she had at least felt something. And now he possessed her utterly, primitively—as a hunter does his quarry, a tiger his kill. Alive, her body belonged to him; dead, she was his ghost.”

Liang Chao Wei is a great actor and does as good a job as could be done in conveying, with his body language and facial expressions, the collaborator's conflicted state of mind after his subordinate informs him about the arrest and execution of the student and her friends. But the scene lacks the devastating punch of Zhang's writing. And putting the above comments into the film with a voice over narration would be awkward and a bit contrived and artificial to boot.

While Zhang achieved early literary fame, she never had a very happy life. She was particularly unfortunate when it came to her relations with men. Her first husband, Hu Lan Cheng (胡兰成), whom she secretly married in the winter of 1944, was very much like the collaborator in 色戒. This man served as the Chief of the Judiciary in Wang Jingwei's collaborationist Chinese Government.

Indeed, when Zhang and Hu married, she was still technically a student. Zhang had a semester of coursework to do at St. John's University in Shanghai but was forced for financial reasons to suspend her studies. And after Zhang's writing made her instantly famous, she never finished her studies. 色戒 is thus a very autobiographical story. And even though Hu was a Japanese collaborator—the Chinese refer to these folks as 汉奸—Zhang married him because he was a very handsome, elegant, and cultured literatus.

Unfortunately, Hu was not only a 汉奸, but an incorrigible philanderer to boot. In fact, when Zhang married Hu, he was still married to his third wife; hence, their secret wedding and common-law marriage. In 1945 Hu moved to Wuhan to work for a newspaper and while staying in a hospital, he seduced a 17 year old nurse. And when the war ended, Zhang's husband fled to Wenzhou. He had yet another extra-marital affair, or 婚外情，while hiding in that city.

Zhang moved to Hong Kong five years after her and Hu divorced in 1947. In 1955 she left China for good to move to the United and a year later, married the prominent American scriptwriter, Ferdinand Reyher, who was several decades older than Zhang. This second husband suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and 1962, which left him paralyzed. He then died in 1967.

While living in the United States, Zhang wrote film scripts, translated her earlier fiction and other Chinese novels into English, and held brief visiting appointments at Radcliffe College and Berkeley. She kept up this work after permanently relocating to Los Angeles in 1972, but became increasingly reclusive. She died there in 1995 as a lonely old woman.

So Zhang's life was indeed much like a beautiful garment that, when closely examined, is crawling with lice. To be sure, she made some bad choices and was to some extent the author of her own misery. However, this behavior, particularly her first disastrous marriage was also in no small measure related to her very unhappy childhood over which she had no control. As Marx famously insisted, men do make history, but can't choose the circumstances in which they make it.

Fortunately, Zhang bequeathed a great literary legacy to the world. I've already read some of it in translation, including, of course, 色戒, and can hardly wait to read her work in Mandarin in the not too distant future.

A change in this blog's format:

A number of friends, readers, and critics—these categories of course are not mutually exclusive—have told me that putting the pinyin and tones of Chinese characters after the characters is distracting and breaks up my writing's lovely flow (he! he!). So from now on, I'm going to put the pinyin, i.e. the way the characters are spelled in the Roman alphabet, along with their tones, below the main text body.

I hope this blog will get a few laowai and China and people back in the states interested in learning Mandarin and give them a bit of help in doing so.

Mandarin has five tones and the tone of each character is the number after its pinyin. 1 is a flat tone, 2 is a rising tone, 3 is a falling and rising tone, 4 is a falling tone, and 5 is a neutral tone. The characters below appear in the order in which they appeared in the blog post:

生命是一袭华美的袍子，里面爬满了虱子: sheng1 ming4 shi4 yi4 xi2 hua2 mei3 de5 pao2 zi5, li3 mian4 pa2 man3 le5 shi4 zi5
张爱玲: Zhang1Ai4Ling2
倾城之恋: Qing1Cheng2Zhi31Lian4
金锁记: Jin1Suo3Ji3
李安: Li3An1
色戒: Se4Jie4
汤唯: Tang1Wei2
梁朝伟: Liang2Chao2Wei3
麻将: ma2jiang4
胡兰成: Hu2Lan2Cheng2
汉奸: han4jian4
婚外请: hun1wai4qing2; literally translated, it means “marriage outside love.” As in so many other cases, Mandarin word order is a bit different from English word order.