Why I loved him, and why I still love her
The following text is translated with the help of ChatGPT, and edited by me.
March. It’s daylight saving time again. Time is passing way, way too fast. Too much has happened in my life, and I still can’t make sense of it…
I want to write about one of the questions I’ve been asking myself over the past two months. What, exactly, is literature? When I started, in class, to seriously write a piece of fiction I truly wanted to write, I realized Stephen King’s advice—“write with the door closed”—really is an excellent one. The workshop format is deeply rooted in creative-writing education in the U.S., but when I still don’t know what my story is, the sound of other people’s feedback can so easily lead me astray. Because of my classmates’ suggestions, I chose to write about a divorced white woman in the 1970s searching for herself (which I do want to write about, at some point), rather than another story about an Asian immigrant woman and her mother—even though the latter theme and those characters are closer to my heart. And then I discovered I couldn’t enter the story at all: the more I wrote, the shallower it became. Maybe one day I’ll have more craft, and my heart will be able to connect with a wider world and many more kinds of characters. But right now, I find I only want to write stories that are faithful to myself. I don’t even need the traditional medium of “the novel”—why can’t I, like Annie Ernaux, write an autobiographical novel, or take myself as a method and write an autoethnography? Even though I didn’t finish a short story in this class and didn’t feel especially inspired, I learned an important lesson: I don’t need to write the “good novel” prescribed by the world. I don’t need to please any reader. Because to me, literature is a process of discovering truth, I have to protect the innocent eye inside me… How lucky I am that I don’t have to make a living by writing. But because of that, there’s no external force setting goals for me, nothing pushing me to write. It feels like drifting in a universe with no one else, just floating and exploring. That kind of freedom is thrilling, and it makes you tremble. Still, I’ve made an agreement with myself: I’ll keep trying, in all kinds of forms and genres, and I won’t look for anyone’s approval.
Let me record, too, a “model example” of a novel that I believe is not literature: One Hundred Years of Solitude… A hot take maybe. After nearly a month of torturously inching through the English edition at the speed of five minutes a day, I finally gave up and crammed the remaining half of the Chinese edition in three stormy hours. When I closed the book, I remembered how, ten years ago, I was deeply moved by the fierce desire depicted in Love in the Time of Cholera. But looking back now, it feels—like One Hundred Years of Solitude—like nothing more than a kind of vulgar, pandering language, saturated with desire that seems to arise from nowhere, along with violence and death… On the parchment, Márquez writes down an unbearable fate for everyone: “the first of the family is tied to a tree, and the last is being eaten by ants.” But how is that fate achieved? Through an extreme fantasy of male desire, violence, and loneliness. Naturally, then, women can only be the projected objects of that desire—outside of the holy and the whore, they are allowed no other way to exist.
Why would Úrsula cross the swamp for five months, with so many people following her, only to return to Macondo—a place without warmth—and spend more than a hundred years holding it up with sheer endurance? Because she must carry men’s madness; she must use a woman’s toughness to contain them—otherwise how can the story go on? And why must Pilar, a member of the Buendía family not recognized by law, live so long and witness the fall of the family? Because she must breed that madness; she must open a brothel; she must stand as the opposite of the holy mother; she must make incest an inescapable destiny. In Márquez’s world, women are forever the nourishment for men’s madness. Love is, too. Solitude is, too. War and revolution as well—everything serves to fuel that kind of masculine extremity. But to me, that extremity is kitsch; it’s anti-human, and the whole method of writing feels like putting the cart before the horse.
Yes, there are vast, strange, beautiful descriptions that stayed with me. The banana company’s colonial exploitation and massacre of Macondo’s workers shook me. But none of it felt real. I didn’t read a writer grappling at close quarters with his Latin American identity, wrestling hand-to-hand with his own loneliness. He is the all-knowing Melquíades who wrote the parchment, not any of the characters inside it. So all of it is too far from my own lived experience as a person (and in particular, as a woman). And that distance isn’t decided by where the story happens or what era it’s set in. Maybe I don’t know Colombian history and culture well enough, but after finishing it, I didn’t feel I’d learned very much either. By contrast, after reading Ferrante, Naples feels like my spiritual hometown; in daily life I’m constantly triggered into thinking of Lila, Lenù, the Solara brothers, and the other neighborhood characters… This is the kind of literature that truly touches the soul, and its real core.
This also makes me think of Dream of the Red Chamber. It, too, is a kind of prophecy: the fates of the Twelve Beauties of Jinling have already been written and revealed at the beginning of the novel. Yet Cao Xueqin holds such profound compassion for every character. He allows emotions—real, complicated to the point of being incomprehensible, something you can only experience—to happen between people. That is the irreplaceable literature I held to my heart. Those emotions flow among objects, words, and plot; through them, I feel the complexity of human experience he was trying to describe. I was moved when Baoyu sent Daiyu two old handkerchiefs and how it makes Daiyu feel “at once glad, at once sad, at once amused, at once afraid”? I was moved when Baochai and Daiyu empathize with each other so deeply that Daiyu, in her sleep, thinks of Baochai and weeps. I was moved when Daiyu and Xiangyun composed linked poems lamenting loneliness; even though the prophecy has no riddle, no need for deciphering—the author writes it plainly: “cold pond—crossing crows’ shadows; chill moon—burying the soul of poetry.” Loneliness and desolation do not need a hundred years to unfold, because they are the real feelings of a real person in a single instant—many instants—the momentary entangling of her and the world around her. That may be more vast, more barren, than a century of history.
In recent years, reading keeps bringing me back to the same question: “Why did I ever love him?” Just as I’ve made the reckless pronouncement about science—“95% of science in the world is trash”—I’ve started to feel that many celebrated novelists aren’t writing literature worth reading. They write an old world inside a boundary. They never go deep to investigate the real world beneath the constructions; they never open their eyes to the pain of the people around them. If that’s the case, then no matter how ornate the language is, it remains rhetorics not literature.
And in complete contrast, I think of Alice Munro. She takes her own life as the ground where literature happens, and it breaks my heart—for her, and even more so, for her daughter Andrea. A piece that has deeply moved me recently is the New Yorker essay “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice.” I wouldn’t say I’m a Munro fan, but after learning, earlier last year, about her dark family history, I started rereading her fiction. Suddenly I felt I understood those undercurrents of emotion, and I became obsessed with them. When I tell friends the story, I often summarize the story as follows: “Munro’s daughter Andrea was sexually abused by her second husband, and after Munro learned about it, not only did she not help her daughter or leave her husband, she even wrote the whole thing into her fiction.” But after reading this essay by Rachel Aviv, I realized that kind of simplified statement is almost a crime. Why did Munro choose to stay with her husband anyway—so far as to ignore her daughter’s accusations, to give up her relationship with her daughter? And why did the whole Munro family, and even the entirety of Canada, and the global media, collectively keep silent? Munro said that if she exposed the scandal, her legacy would vanish completely, and people would only remember that her husband was a pedophile. Likewise, Andrea’s siblings chose to protect their mother, not her… But I think they were all wrong. In fact, making the truth public is not only Andrea’s redemption—it also makes Munro a true legend. Only when those false, glittering legacies are pierced can I see through the halo of “genius writer” and “Nobel laureate,” meet her eye on equal terms, and truly live inside her stories for a moment.
When I reread the story “Vandals” in the Open Secrets selection, I realized how cruel Munro is. She goes all the way into her daughter’s perspective through fiction and dissects herself. Through the eyes of the harmed little girl, Liza, she watches herself acting through the character Bea: how she falls uncontrollably in love with that beast of a man, how she becomes enamored of that madness. His jokes split her in two from head to toe; she crashes headlong into his silence—the slabs of that frigid darkness. Bea shapes herself into someone who “can endure this madness,” and lives with that beastly man for the rest of her life. I imagine the things Andrea said when she accused her—Munro must have accused herself a thousand times over, in every possible language, judging herself through different plots and stories. Otherwise she could never have written that shocking truth—through Liza’s words: “She could have spread safety, if she had chosen to.” Yes. She didn’t choose to protect her daughter. She understood the brutal truth and still let it happen, turning it into fuel for literature. Maybe this is a sacrifice to literature—one that also sacrifices her daughter, unjustly—or maybe she was too cowardly to bear the consequences of enacting justice in real life, so she could only confess through literature. I know many people, after this was revealed, feel Munro’s work should be boycotted, but I don’t think so… I simply love her literature even more, because no matter what, she is absolutely honest with literature, pouring everything she has into it.
In that New Yorker essay, Munro’s other daughter Jenny says, “There’s nothing more compelling than a conversation with my mom.” I understand that too well. For a long time I couldn’t understand why I’m always more forgiving of those shining people—why, after knowing so much, I still love him/her. Munro’s story helped me understand a little: this love exists because I love what they love; I can empathize with their fierce and real devotion to something… That revelation also let me set down some psychological burden and slowly accept that I can still love someone even if they are terrible and abusive some or all of the time.
I don’t know when I’ll have time again to start writing fiction. Recently, it feels like science has pulled me back in. But now I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I can only take the glory and give everything. Because once again, the stars have aligned. Because most of life is dust—and when you find a diamond, you can only hold on tight… I can’t throw it away in search of a bigger, brighter one. Wish me luck.