Susan's Smile, all about envy
By Yang Guang (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-02-26 09:51
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Writer Ye Zhaoyan is bent on a switch, after depicting "the reality of myth" in Hou Yi, 2006, a novel that reconstructs the ancient Chinese tale of Chang E and her self-banishment to the moon.
The idea finally materialized last month in Susan's Smile, a novel of "the myth of reality".
Ye, 53, started writing in 1980 and has produced a literary corpus of over 4 million words. In previous writings, he has demonstrated his knack for knitting intriguing and often bizarre love stories into profound historical contexts.
For instance in Nanjing 1937: A Love Story (1996), his best known work outside China, he fashioned an unlikely romance between a philandering professor and the much younger wife of a pilot, on the eve of the Nanjing Massacre in 1937.
Gary G Xu, associate professor of comparative literature at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, points out Ye's inclination for "disguise(ing) under his popular appeals serious and critical reflections upon the relationship between history, memory, and love".
He attributes Ye's self-imposed responsibility for "connecting the contemporary with the early Republican period" to his family origins - Ye is the grandson of Ye Shengtao (1894-1988), a prominent writer, publisher and educator - despite the writer's denial of his grandfather's influence.
In his most recent offering, Ye is determined that he will have nothing to do with history. Instead, he looks at many present-day, much-talked-about topics, such as phoenix men (hard-working men from the countryside), peacock women (women from well-off urban families), mistresses, and the hidden rules of officialdom.
He says the seed of the story goes back to as early as the 1980s, inspired by the smile of a girl on TV. The smile has lingered in his mind through all these years.
"When I first saw her talking about her suicide attempt, with a smile, I felt no emotion," he recalls, "but hearing of her death half a month later, I was truly shocked.
"She talked about death, with such composure and assurance, and then she did it. That's the mythical part of reality, and that keeps giving me the shivers."
Susan's Smile is deprived of the "intriguing" and "bizarre" elements typical of the author's style.
Born of poor peasant parents, Yang Daoyuan climbs up the social ladder, thanks to the nepotism of his wife, Zhang Weifang's family.
Yang wins acclaim by taking care of the unfaithful Zhang, paralyzed in a car accident. But he is also involved in an extra-marital affair later with Su Shan, who commits suicide after a series of emotional entanglements.
According to book critic Dan Zhu, Ye succeeds in revealing some secrets of Chinese-style marriage, a rare success with male writers. Ye is also criticized by some for embellishing the mistress Su Shan. The writer invokes Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary in his defense.
"Neither Anna nor Madame Bovary is morally infallible," he says. "The point is, the writer's job is not to make the judgment of what she is, but to show how she is, and why she becomes this."
Ye declines to disclose the "theme" or "moral" of his novel, because "as my father's friend, writer Gao Xiaosheng told me, writing a novel is like blowing up a tire; if you talk about the theme, you'll end up with a flat tire".
But he does give away the one word at the core of the novel - "envy" - by making the analogy between his story and Shakespeare's Othello.
"Othello, the Moorish general, strangles his wife Desdemona, while Yang kills Su Shan by other means," he says. "What is this 'other means?' You'll have to read the novel."