Zhang Ailing and Lust, Caution

Quite a while back, during a writers’ conference, an American writer asked me if I had heard of Eileen Chang. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. I shook my head, which surprised him and made him frown, saying repeatedly, “Really!” Not until he handed me a novella titled Lust, Caution, did I realize that Eileen Chang is actually the Chinese writer Zhang Ailing’s English name. ( Then a few months later, Ang Lee’s movie based on Zhang’s novella won a Golden Bear.)

Of course, I’ve heard of Zhang Ailing. Not just that, I read all of her published novels, short stories, essays as a Chinese literature major in China in the early 90s. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that she was the hottest writer among female college students in those days. The recognition of her putative genius over the last decade is merely a revival after her writing was neglected and banned for half a century in China due to the feudalistic and petty-bourgeois content in her writing and her dubious political stance in real life. Zhang was a literary star in the war-wrecked and Japan-controlled China in the 40s, famous for her sophisticated, cunning, yet often sarcastic depiction of love, marriage, and family sagas mainly set in the old Shanghai, before her fear of the brand new communist society took her into exile, first to Hong Kong, then eventually the United States in 1954. While working for American News Agency’s Hong Kong branch as a translator, she was instructed by the agency to write Yang Ge (The Rice Sprout Song), an anti-communist novel about rural China. Though the book, written in English, received favorable reviews in the U.S, it sold poorly and didn’t bring the success she had anticipated.

Her exile in the U.S. offered no comfort. Her marriage with an aged and frail American scriptwriter, Ferdinand Reyer, led to financial hardship and her writing, without an appreciative audience, bore little fruit. Hoping to find readership and recognition in her adopted country, she took to translating Hai Shang Hua Lie Zhuan (The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai), a Qing Dynasty novel by Han Bangqing. Her translation was published twelve years after her death. Her latter years were mostly spent organizing her old writing and studying Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber), the most acclaimed classical Chinese novel. After her husband’s death in 1967, she lived as a recluse, a lifestyle not totally strange to her since she was quite isolated in her youth, until she died of natural causes in her Los Angeles apartment in 1995, at the age of 75.

Ever since she left mainland China, the source of her inspiration and creativity, she struggled, financially and career-wise. Her lack of success was especially poisonous to her because she reveled in fame and celebrity, even taking pride in her materialism and vanity. She says in one of her pieces of prose, “Fame must come early in one’s life; if it comes too late, the pleasure it brings is discounted.”

Much can be written about her legendary and controversial life as a writer and a human being, and much has been written about her in her birth country. Ang Lee’s movie adoption of Lust, Caution brings her into the spotlight in the Western world, where she is little known. Set in the 40s, against the backdrop of the heated conflict between the Japan-supported puppet government and the legitimate government run by the Nationalist Party, the story centers on an affair between a Japanese collaborator and a patriotic young woman. The woman has been sent to seduce the man so as to kill him but later surrenders to her momentary love for him, which leads to a disastrous outcome. It is a psychological masterpiece, the plot engaging, characterization acute, structure seamless, yet it has been widely criticized in the Chinese-speaking world since its first publication in Taiwan in 1978, not only because of its sympathy for a collaborator with the Japanese, but also because of its drastic distortion of the true story it was based on, of a well-known martyr named Zheng Pingru, who was murdered in the 40s after she failed in an assassination attempt on a Japanese collaborator.

Upon publication, Lust, Caution also attracted no small amount of attention to its author’s personal life. Despite Zhang’ denial of the story being partially autobiographic, people drew connections between its characters and her own well publicized love-hate relationship with Hu Lancheng, also labeled a traitor for collaborating with Japan, and who favored his other lovers over Zhang and later escaped to post-war Japan. The ending of the story is often thought to be Zhang’s own speculation about Hu’s ambiguous attitude towards her.

Just as Zhang’s portrait of a martyr once aroused teeming debate in the Chinese-speaking world, Ang Lee’s interpretation of Zhang’s story is facing the same fate. The piquant love-making in the movie has earned him both fans and enemies in China, where the movie was released with seven-minutes cut from certain sex scenes. Art or bad taste? Hollywood or independent? Innovation or marketing? Necessity or frippery? These discussions were all over the media while I was visiting China three months ago, right before the movie premier there. After all, there is little sexual content in Zhang’s story and the boldest description of the two protagonists’ mutual affection translates like this: in a sedan, sitting next to the woman, the man positions his arm in a way that his elbow touches the woman’s ample chest.

All in all, Zhang’s Lust, Caution isn’t Zheng Pingru’s Lust, Caution, nor Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, yet they are umbilically connected through people’s gossip and memories.

An aristocratic scion, a literary prodigy, a political exile, an unfulfilled lover, a vain woman, Zhang summarizes her life the best with her own words: “Life is a splendid robe, infested with lice.”