It started pouring a few minutes after I arrived at Blue Bottle that October morning last fall.
I don't think I'll ever tire of spending my day at a coffee shop reading and writing and watching the rain drench the world outside, and this cafe on Shattuck and University was after my heart when it branded itself as a place "haunted with literary ghosts" occupying a "liminal space between campus and city...[a] setting quiet enough where the muses’ whispers reach the ears of aspiring writers." I wrote my paper on Eileen Chang's novella 《沉香屑:第一炉香》("Aloeswood Incense" in the English translation by Karen Kingsbury) for my modern Chinese literature course at Blue Bottle in one sitting last year, and in the spirit of both Halloween and college nostalgia, I wanted to write about the parallel sentiments in two of my favorite stories from two very different contexts.
First: Eileen Chang.
I'm not sure where exactly the enigma surrounding Chang and her body of work starts and ends. Maybe it's a mistake to separate the two in the first place. Her stories are deeply informed by her own lived experiences, set to the backdrop of growing up in an aristocratic family, the outbreak of war, a marriage to someone who kept company with the enemy, and of course the prodigal literary talent that sold out within days of her initial publication. She wrote many of her famous stories by the age of 21 and wrote about relationships between people, often in times of war. Chang was both a sophisticated literary writer and a popular romance novelist, and if that seems mutually exclusive to you, her stories are proof that it's not. When she was criticized for squandering her talent by writing about such "trivial things" (this was, after all, a time in Chinese literary history that propagated revolutionary writing), she argued that human history isn't about the big revolutions: it's about the every day, the mundane, the ordinary people in all their unheroic glory.
Chang's collection《传奇》(chuanqi) is known as Romances in English; a more direct transliteration of the title is "tales of the marvelous or strange," which refers to the chuanqi style of "marvel stories" that sometimes centered on transgressive relationships between ghosts/fox fairies (women) and scholars (men) that break boundaries of life and death. Although Chang's stories are devoid of supernatural elements, she is very much interested in female characters that find themselves trapped in harsh realities and the sacrifices they make for love.
"Aloeswood Incense"—the first story in Romances—tells the story of Ge Weilong, a Shanghai girl who enters the world of opulence and vice of Hong Kong society and gets trapped within it by falling for and sleeping with the mixed-race playboy George Qiao. He works for Weilong's aunt Madame Liang as a honeytrap: he attracts gullible young women to Liang's estate to bring young men for Liang to seduce, while rich, older men take their pick among the pretty girls who don't know any better. But Weilong isn't like the other girls (or so she thinks); she refuses to be sold to the man Liang set up for her, and instead falls for George in spite of everything she knows about him and her aunt's sordid business.
If writers like Edith Wharton or F. Scott Fitzgerald were astute but perhaps more measured observers of the hollowness and the extravagant carelessness of the rich, Eileen Chang's incisive storytelling holds nothing back in sparing her characters from the inescapable cruelty of life as she sees it. When Weilong discovers that the reason George won't marry her is because she isn't rich enough to support the decadent lifestyle he refuses to give up, she resolves to make her own money—by prostituting herself to her aunt. The thing about love is that it's not about wanting someone for all their virtues; it's about wanting someone after seeing them at their worst without making excuses to justify their self-centeredness; it's about wanting someone so much that you make the choice to cross the point of no return for them without ever looking back.
Deep in the forest of the Scottish woods ruled over by fairies, a girl named Janet must also make a choice for love at the crossroads at midnight on Halloween.
In the old medieval fairy tale of "Tam Lin," a mortal man turned fairy knight is captured by the Queen of Faeries and is about to be sacrificed to Hell. It befalls on his lover Janet, a human girl pregnant with his child, to save him. The Faerie Queen turns him into all manners of beasts and creatures, monsters and horrors and burning coal, all to compel Janet to let go but she holds on to him through every terrible form he takes through the night. In the end, Janet wins: when the night is over, Tam Lin goes back to being human again, freed from the Faerie Queen's magic and back in the arms of the woman who loved him through his most monstrous iterations.
At their cores, both "Aloeswood Incense" and "Tam Lin" are stories about women whose love overcomes the abject ugliness of their lovers true and worst selves, but that doesn't mean that the women who save them are there to redeem them. Chang is unforgivingly honest about her characters’ ambition in chasing material pleasures; at times, it seems as though Weilong and George are both more seduced by the grandeur of Hong Kong society life than they are by each other, but that doesn’t make Weilong and George’s love is any less genuine. By day, they continue to play their games of greed and lust to attract the rich and pretty, but by night, they are able to strip away the false pretenses they put on for everyone else and can momentarily be themselves with each other.
In the penultimate scene as George and Weilong—now husband and wife—walk through a bazaar in Aberdeen, he tells her in a moment of self-awareness: “one day, you will recognize how base of a person I am. And by that time, you will regret everything you’ve sacrificed for me.” He knows he doesn't deserve the sacrifice she made to be with him, and on some level he doesn't understand why she did it in the first place. Maybe he doesn't have to.
Weilong replies: “I love you, so what does that matter?”
In a world in which people relentlessly consume and use each other, Chang posits that love means the unabashed acceptance of another person exactly as they are. It doesn't have to last forever to be worth it, and in the ultimate scene as Weilong thoughts drift to the terror of her unknown future, she forces herself to only see the here and now. Sometimes the choices we make are as simple as the desire to hold on to the inexplicable truth of love, real love, even when it's as ephemeral as the dull orange ember tip of a stick of burning incense about to go out. And maybe that's enough.
Maybe that's all that matters.
xoxo, vivian
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