Love needs no introduction. Or does it? Two stories in this chapter, “Little Heartaches” and “Fake Love Letter,” seem to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries quite easily; the other two, “A Gentleman’s Love” and “Give Him Peace,” do not. Love must be understood in context, yet it is impossible for anyone to share in the entire range of experiences of human love.
“Little Heartaches” captures, in 721 Chinese characters, four potentially romantic encounters, a couple of which perhaps resemble failed attempts at love. Not only does the episodic form make reading easy, the perspective allows readers to empathize with the boy’s tender emotions, bewilderment, loneliness, and frustration. But is there more to this deceptively sparse story? Why does the story highlight love’s folly? Why does it make failures, especially the early ones, endearing? Is there a connection between the boy’s frustration and the contaminated world? What does the dynamic between what he captures (or fails to capture) and what he understands (or fails to understand) say about the nature of knowing and knowledge? What makes a person wise? When we think about these questions, when we look inside to understand why a child’s innocence is so appealing, we may find what many Taoists believe to be the origin of love.
“Fake Love Letter,” for all its literary merits, was chosen for a practical reason. The author, Zou Jingzhi, was a “sent-down youth” for eight years during the Cultural Revolution. This short-short story by him provides a window onto the way his generation felt about that time and experience. Self-reflection, rather than the familiar negative attitudes about the Down to the Countryside movement, predominates in the story. As it happens, the youth of this generation have been behind China’s miraculous rise in the past thirty some years. Those sent-down youths now hold many key positions in the Communist Party of China and within state authority.
In the past, the protagonist of “A Gentleman’s Love” has been accused of being an unethical high school teacher encouraging a student’s romantic advances. Many international students from China have read it as a story about the dated tradition that obliges marriage between a man and a woman who have engaged in any kind of physical contact. Please try to go further than these readings. Asking these questions may help: What is the historical context of the story? Why does the story make it easier to save someone’s life than to save his or her face? What qualifies someone to be a teacher in Chinese cultural tradition? A gentleman’s old-fashioned yet constant worry of not being able to do right by others, of failing to live up to the Confucian standards of human decency, may become a prominent concern as you read and reread the story.
Reading “Give Him Peace,” you will be disappointed if you are expecting a morality tale, or if you attempt to locate the story within the framework of the Oedipus complex, or if fidelity is, for you, an absolute value in marriage. Quite a few readers have found the male protagonist almost ridiculous in his vulnerability and his courting of professional disaster. But perhaps this story is about true love nonetheless. Take Ruyi for example. She tries to stay true to her emotions and to remain loyal to all her loved ones at the same time. Her love may not be exclusive; yet that love does empower her in unique ways and sets her free, beyond the precepts set by men or God.
Love is a universal topic. Within its broad perimeter, the stories in this chapter constantly ask two questions: What qualifies us to say things about other people in general and about people of different time, space, and agency who have their own belief systems, values, and ways of life in particular? What can we do, with and through love, to proactively facilitate cross-cultural understanding?