The Eternal Snow Beauty
—from the anthology Taipei Jen
She cursed, flinging her bag down on the dressing table as she came in, then settled on her butt in front of the large mirror. What a cheapo!
Nuits de Paris, Nuits de Paris indeed! ... even the john at the Paramount took up more room than the Nuits de Paris dance floor! Why, with a face like Tung's, no bum could even have gotten a job scrubbing the toilets at the Paramount!
She opened a container of Evening in Paris and dashed a few drops on her head and body. As she gazed into the mirror, she lost herself in thought....
The Last Night of Taipan Chin
—from the anthology Taipei Jen
Under the sentimental pen of Pai Hsien-yung, the intricacies of Chinese women's innermost thought processes are forcefully drawn, animating his characters, making their coquettishness, pretensions, and dispositions live and breathe around the reader.
Characters are the core of almost all his novels; the storylines are only a setoff. Pai has a profound understanding of women compared to most of his gender, and indeed to most women. And his writing about the opposite sex is more exquisitely done—more life-filled than his depictions of men.
Eleven years ago, when Taipei Jen (Taipei Characters), a collection of fourteen short stories, was first published, it created a literary furor. Pai immediately became "the apple of God's eye" in island literary circles. Ouyang Tzu, Pai's college classmate and a distinguished literary critic, called it "a publication of unusual complexity" and went on to write Wang Hsieh Tang Chien Te Yen Tzu (Swallows Nesting in the Halls of Influential Families) to analyze the world Pai had created within it.
Taipei Jen is considered a literary work demonstrating an acute sense of history, and Pai is accordingly considered a writer with an outstanding consciousness of time and space. This is manifested in Pai's characters, no matter in Taipei or New York. They are all inseparable from the Chinese mainland. That is, they all came originally from the mainland, followed the Republic of China's government, and first settled down on this island in the '50s. When they were leaving their mainland hometowns, they were either young or at the prime of middle life; fifteen or twenty years later, in the stories, they are middle-aged or old. The upheavals in their pasts have burned on their memories. The heavy load of that past directly affects their present.
The characters in the tales of Taipei Jen hail from almost every stratum of late '60s Taipei society: from old, dignified General Pu in the Dirge of Liang Fu, to the retired nanny Shun-en in Ode to Bygone Days; upper class Madame Tou in Wandering in the Garden, Waking From A Dream, to a lower-class top commander in Love's Lone Flower. Taipei Jen includes intellectuals, Professor Yu Chin-lei in Winter Night; businessmen, the "Boss-Lady" in Glories at Blossom Bridge; servants, Wang Hsiung in A Sea of Blood-Red Azaleas; soldiers, Lai Ming-sheng in New Year's Eve; celebrities, Yin Hsueh-yen in The Eternal Snow Beauty; and taxi dancers, as Jolin Chin in The Last Night of Taipan Chin.
Taipei Jen seizes the exact life outlook of its players. However, if we take this to mean that as a literary piece it is mere realistic description, or satire, then the implication is distorted.
The anthology gives to its readers a sense of the keen contrast of Chinese life present and past. A poem, Raven Gown Alley by Tang poet Liu Yu-hsi (772-842), is quoted by Pai as a leader for the book. In it is the motif for TaipeI Jen:
By the Vermilion Bird Bridge,
the wild grasses flower;
Over Raven Gown Alley.
a setting sun lingers.
In days of old. swallows nested
among the halls
of the Wangs and Hsiehs;
Now they linger by the huts
of commoners.
According to Ouyang Tzu, Taipei Jen really has only two principal characters: one the "past," the other the "present." The former is represented in the seemingly simple, old-style, order-stressed, human-sympathy-centered agricultural-society of China past. The present is in a successful industrial commercial society that is snobbish and focused on materialism.
Many of the characters in Taipei Jen cannot extricate themselves from their pasts. They do not want at all to give up the past, but seek meaning in their lives via the illusion that the "present is still with the past." This, the major irony of the book, is also the element that Pai particularly manipulates to arouse the sympathy of his readers.
There is special significance for Pai in calling these mainlanders "Taipei jen" —Taipei characters. Although they have settled down in Taipei over a period of time and appear to be as other citizens of Taipei, actually, they are not. Not in their hearts:
"Glories at Blossom Bridge" in Taipei, though it is also a small eatery, is, of course, not the reincarnation of the rice-noodle shop back at the Blossom Bridge just outside the River-East Gate in Kweilin, capital of Kwanghsi Province. The young man whom Taipan Chin asks to dance on her last night at the ballroom, though also a shy and handsome student, is actually not the boy she crazily loved in those years.
Yin Hsueh-yen never lets her residence fall below the impressive standards of the one on Avenue Joffre in Shanghai, though she is now in Taipei. Madame Tou is really no longer Madame-General Chien, young, beautiful, and enjoying all that honor and wealth ....
Among all the characters of Taipei Jen, perhaps Jolin Chin of The Last Night of Taipan Chin is the most beloved. "I was also so fond of the woman I created, that I finished the story in only three days," Pai recalled and laughed.
Taipan Chin is a witty, mature woman. She is able to face reality and knows how to take care of herself. She needs no sympathy from others. It is because she is interiorally different from the rest of the characters in Taipei Jen-not a tragic person-that the writer was able to tell her story via rather happy and relaxed strokes.
Pai included short stories of his earlier writing stages in two other collections, The Lonely Seventeen-Year-Old and Che Hsien Chi (A Story of Immortals Among Mortals). Al though Pai deems these earlier writings to be immature, one of the stories, Jade Love, to all his fans has always been a story that beckons for renewed readings.
I went downstairs into the sitting room where Jade Love was standing with Small Aunt, and I couldn't help holding my breath. She was wearing a jacket, white as moonlight, long trousers, black cotton shoes. From the fringes of her shiny black hair, swept back into a loose knot not unlike the style of a Cantonese maid, peeped a pair of almond-shaped earrings. Her face was soft egg-shell, her eyes luminous and much more attractive than the eyes of Pearl of Desire, the famous opera singer known to all Kweilin as Heavenly Pepper.
—from Jade Love
Critic Yang Yueh-sun wrote in an analytical essay on Jade Love, Dirge for a Passionate Woman: " Among all the women in Pai's short stories, the most elegant have experienced many vicissitudes in life and, yet, have resigned themselves to their fates; and they are not rare. But those like Jade Love-outwardly meek and inwardly unyielding, rebellious and with a contradictory personality-are rare indeed."
Jade Love, daughter-in-law of the Liu family living near the Flower Bridge, was a member of an established household. But, her husband was an opium smoker and died early, and as the family fortunes fell, her mother-in-law drove her out. She joined little brother Yung's family as a wetnurse. A little over 30 now, Jade Love did not want to remarry—not over concern for the old social ethics, but because there were hidden currents in her life.
She was secretly in love with a much younger man. She appeared gentle and quiet, but Jade Love could by no means put on the widow's stone face. Otherwise, the men-servants of the master's house would not act like flies smelling blood.
To care for tubercular Ching-sheng, her sweetheart as well as foster son, or perhaps, simply to keep him within her control, Jade Love spent almost all her savings. She felt that Ching-sheng was all she had. Without him, she was lost herself.
But, Ching-sheng reacted to Jade Love's solicitude with the pent-up desire to escape from her strict control, to be free. She was, after all, not his real mother.
Ching-sheng was in love with the Peking opera singer Golden Swallow, though he knew well in his heart that what the singer could or was willing to give him in terms of devotion could not compare with that of Jade Love. However, Golden Swallow had what Jade Love grievously lacked-full youth. And that was exactly what worried Jade Love.
Then, one night, Jade Love lost everything. She donned a white jacket, arranged her hair, and put on her earrings—this rebellious, passionate woman—to go to that filthy and odorous dead-end alley. She entered one of a row of low, wooden houses and cut a hole the size of a wine cup in her sweetheart's throat.
"One year, my sister Chih flew in from the United States. We talked about the old days of our family, and she mentioned a wetnurse of hers—one who was witty and fond of wearing white earrings. Suddenly, the thought crossed my mind that a woman fond of wearing white ear rings must be full of affection. So I start ed to weave a story for her," Pai ruminated. Pai wrote the story while he was still in college. "The passion between a man and a woman is sometimes so violent that they, regardless of the consequences, destroy not only themselves but their loved one," he went on.
"In the old days, Chinese popular philosophy stressed the teachings of Confucianism and Taoism, ways of living which restrained the natural development of uncontrollable human nature. While the Western world long ago accepted the existence of passion—of original sin, in old China, the Confucianists and Taoists completely repressed the primeval desires of humankind."
Through the eyes of ancient Chinese tradition, Jade Love, as a woman of loose morals, is to be totally condemned. However, today's society no longer sees women as solely accessories to men. They demand a social position and a world of their own, and to be judged on equal terms. So it is, through the eyes of a child—Pai did not write the story from a grownup's vantage—Jade Love touches off a final sympathy in her readers.
When the little brother, Yung, narrates the story, it is one or two months, or perhaps one or two years after the death of Jade Love. However, Yung was not sensible then. He did not understand the possibility of doomed love between a man and woman. He thought the tale interesting, odd—a love veiled in a nightmare of horror. He did a good job relating the details. But, he never realized that he himself was the key person in bringing on the tragedy.
Pai Hsien-yurig was born in 1937 in Kweilin in Kwanghsi Province on the mainland, the fifth of ten children of General Pai Chung-hsi (1893-1966). It is not hyperbole to note that his works inevitably remind his readers of the greatest of Chinese classics, Dream of the Red Chamber. And he himself acknowledges, "I first read it while I was only a fifth grader, and to the present, it is kept at the head of my bed. I must admit that it has had great influence on my philosophy of life as well as my writing career."
However, Dream is not the "catalyst" that sparked his entry into literature. "Actually, it was my childhood cook, Lao Yang," Pai chuckled. "With his glib tongue, Lao Yang was able to turn any dull story into one roaring with life. On the winter nights, my room was warmed by the intense flames from a brazier in which some sweet potatoes were baked. Lao Yang would come and ask me, 'Fifth Little Master, where did I stop last night?' I would reply 'With Hsueh Jen-kuei on an Eastward Punitive Expedition.''' It was the first novel the boy would read.
During his last year at Chienkuo Middle School, Pai encountered his second inspiration, teacher Li Ya-yun. "She would recite Yu Mei Jen (a ci poem by Li Yu, the last monarch of the Southern Tang Dynasty, noted for literary genuis), her sweet-sounding voice rich with the melody," Pai recalled. She helped him to glimpse the immense solemnity of ancient Chinese literature.
One day, in a small bookstore in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan, he discovered two old issues' of the Literary Review magazine. Hsia Chi-an was then its editor-in-chief. Pai was immediately fascinated by the translated Western writings, and he made a very crucial decision in his life-he would retake the competitive college entrance examinations and this time opt to study literature as Mrs. Li had advised. He would study Western literature, which she believed would better help him to literary creation.
Pai was successful at the exams and entered the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Taiwan University-actually, over his parents' opposition. His father had finally decided the situation was beyond salvation and didn't insist. He did, however, in withdrawing, cite an ancient Chinese teaching, "One studies literature only when he has spare time." Then his mother sighed, "Let him make his own choice; every trade has its master."
In 1960, when he was an NTU junior, Pai and several of his classmates, including Wang Wen-hsing and Ouyang Tzu, founded Modern Literature magazine. "So, we had a territory under our own control, and it was now much easier to publish our writings—whether they were finely or poorly written," Pai said. Jade Love was published in the first issue of the magazine.
Some local critics compare Pai Hsien-yung to the late William Faulkner, because both of their writings "look back" and are taken with the collapse of a big family in a high society or the gradual disintegration of a culture—and with unreasoning passion, degeneration, and death. They both speak of the unescapably tragic fate of a traditional agricultural society as it is transformed into a rational, industrial-commercial society.
Although Pai's education has centered on Western literature, he has remained more traditionally Chinese than most of his peers. During his first few years in the United States, the lash of the new Western culture only led him to new intuitive perceptions of his own country's cultural tides. "It is always a pity when some young men who are not yet familiar with their own country's political situation, history, and culture, rush to a foreign land for advanced study. The lash of Western culture, coming from all sides, impels them ... they lose their bearings," Pai declared.
Pai has only published one novel, Nieh Tzu (A Vile and Sinful Son), a work about homosexuality. He once said that when he was writing of this "dark kingdom" (his own description), he suffered great depression. In Chinese literary history, this subject matter has appeared more than once; however, Chinese works of this nature are in the manner of a dragonfly skimming water. Never are they handled seriously. When Pai was writing it, he was also exploring, dissecting the problem.
Pai is now Professor of Chinese literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
"Most of the graduate students in my class come from Taiwan and Hongkong, and the undergraduates are from the United States," he noted. "There is one thing they have in common: that is, they all love things Chinese. So I enjoy my way of life here very much. I teach four days a week; the rest of the time I read books and write something. Lately, I have been busy with turning some of my writings into movies, such as The Last Night of Taipan Chin, Jade love, and perhaps Love's Lone Flower," Pai said.
He has been planning another novel with its main theme along the lines of Taipan Jen—tied to the epoch-making change in this country.