Deep Read · Pai Hsien-yung · No.44
Fourteen stories · Pai Hsien-yung (Bai Xianyong) · collected 1971
Taipei. A banquet in a private mansion, half over, and the flute has already started. Someone says: Madame Qian, sing something — who at this table sings better than you?
The flute climbs twice, waiting for her line. She opens her mouth. Nothing comes out.
The table covers for her instantly: the Taipei weather is hard on the throat, she's had too much wine. She smiles, nods, picks up her glass.
Thirty years ago in Nanjing, when she sang this aria, a room full of generals did not dare make a sound.
Fourteen people carried from the mainland to Taipei by the collapse of 1949 — dance hostesses, officers, servants, professors, a general's widow — go on living in Taipei while the place they are actually alive in is a Shanghai, a Nanjing, a Guilin they will never see again. The book's real claim is this: they have not grown old. Their era died, and they failed to die with it.
Pai Hsien-yung (b. 1937), born in Guilin, is the son of Bai Chongxi, one of the Nationalist army's senior generals. His childhood moved between Chongqing, Shanghai and Nanjing; after 1949 the family went by way of Hong Kong to Taiwan. He studied foreign literature at National Taiwan University and in 1960, with his classmates, founded the journal Modern Literature — more or less the doorway through which Kafka, Joyce and Faulkner entered Chinese. He later went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and taught Chinese literature for decades at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The fourteen stories were written between the mid-1960s and 1971, when they were collected. The book occupies a peculiar slot in Chinese fiction: it is a thoroughly Chinese elegy built with imported modernist tools. Stream of consciousness, restricted point of view, an interlocking symbol system — that craft comes from Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner. What it is used on — rise and fall, then and now, the great house emptying — comes straight out of Dream of the Red Chamber and Tang poetry. Pai put a ninth-century poem by Liu Yuxi at the front of the book as its epigraph:
Wild grass in flower by Vermilion Sparrow Bridge; slanting evening sun at the mouth of Blackrobe Lane.
The swallows that once nested in the halls of the great families now fly down into ordinary homes.— Liu Yuxi, "Blackrobe Lane," epigraph to Taipei People (rendered here into English)
Twenty-eight characters, and the formula for the whole book is already there: the swallows of the great houses, now nesting with commoners. The fourteen stories only break that one line into fourteen ways of falling.
This is not a novel but fourteen stories that can be read separately and are unmistakably one book together. So what follows is arranged not by page order but by the manner of the fall.
The opening story hands you someone who barely reads as a person. Yin Xueyan never gets old. She comes out of the dance floor of Shanghai's Paramount ballroomseed ② and walks straight into a mansion in Taipei; twenty years pass and she is still in white, still that face, still that unhurried walk.seed ①
The men around her, meanwhile, go down one by one. In Shanghai a young heir named Wang Guisheng threw a fortune at her and was later executed for his dealings; a section chief named Hong married her and lost his post and his household soon after. In Taipei the young industrialist Xu Zhuangtu takes up with her, and at the height of his success is stabbed to death by one of his own workers.
Pai's handling is arctic. He never once shows Yin Xueyan doing anything wrong — she does nothing at all. She keeps her mahjong parties going, greets every guest with the same soft courtesy, produces a measured quantity of tears for the bereaved. It is other people who assign her a meaning: Xu's family call her a white-tiger star, a jinx. And at the story's end the guests come as usual, the tiles clatter as usual, and she stands in the middle holding a cup of tea like a piece of porcelain that does not sweat.
On a first read she is simply uncanny. Read the whole book and come back, and you see what she is: she is the only thing here outside the jurisdiction of time, because she was never a person — she is the past itself. The white dress, the Paramount diction, the obsolete forms of address: a living specimen of an order that has already died. Whoever gets close to her pays that order's bill.
The narrator is an air force officer's wife, addressed by everyone as Shiniang — "teacher's wife." In Nanjing just after the war she keeps a maternal eye on a squadron of young pilots and their families. One of them, Guo Zhen, marries a thin, timid schoolgirl called Zhu Qing, who lowers her head at strangers and speaks in a voice like a mosquito's.
Then Guo Zhen's plane goes down. Zhu Qing does not weep or scream; she simply tries to die, is stopped, and is left hollowed out. Pai gives this a few lines — a brevity that is close to cruel. A young widow's collapse, priced at half a page.
Cut to Taipei. At an air force social club Shiniang meets Zhu Qing again and hardly knows her: heavier, fairer, laughing, dressed loudly, standing on a small stage singing. Young pilots circle her as before, revolving. Later one of them crashes too. Shiniang watches her carefully, braced for the collapse. Zhu Qing gives a short laugh, says something weightless, and goes back to arranging a mahjong table and eating her dinner.
The whole force of the story lives in the chasm between one woman's two responses to the same event. The first time she wants to die with him; the second time she doesn't move an eyebrow. What happened in between is never explained by a single word. Pai leaves the entire process blank and sets the before and the after side by side so you have to measure the distance yourself. And the colder implication: the way to survive was to swap herself out. Zhu Qing lives better than anyone in this book, at the price that the Zhu Qing who would have died for Guo Zhen is gone. Call her a survivor if you like. You could as easily call her one of the dead.
Jin Zhaoli, around forty, is the taipan — head hostess — of the Nightly Paris dance hall in Taipei. Tonight is her last night after twenty years in the trade: tomorrow she marries Chen Farong, a rich, elderly, distinctly unhandsome man. She runs the floor with a stream of profanity while privately auditing two decades.
Her refrain is "back at the Paramount," and she has nothing but contempt for Taipei's provincial imitations of glamour.payoff ② ↑ That address is the deepest wire in the book: Yin Xueyan came out of the Paramount, and so did Jin Zhaoli. Two women out of the same dance floor — one of whom has kept time locked outside the door for twenty years without altering a millimetre, while the other has been ground down by it into a mouth full of knives. Pai never writes a line of commentary; he just starts two people from the same address and lets you see where each of them arrived.
Something breaks out on the floor: a young hostess, Zhu Feng, is pregnant, the man has vanished, and she is sobbing helplessly. Jin Zhaoli tears into her — for being stupid, for being cheap — and then, having finished, takes the valuables off her own body and gives them to the girl. Because twenty years ago she was Zhu Feng: there was a young man called Yueru, clean and knowing nothing, and it came to nothing. She has been swallowing that account for twenty years.
Near closing she notices a boy sitting in a corner, unable to dance, scarlet with embarrassment. She walks over and pulls him onto the floor. Dim light, slow music; she says nothing at all. Twenty years of foul mouth, calculation and snobbery are annulled for three minutes inside a dance with no words in it. Then she goes off to be married.
Her twin is Yunfang in "Love's Lone Flower." Yunfang also came from Shanghai, where she looked after a girl named Wubao who was tormented past bearing and killed herself with opium. In Taipei she meets Juanjuan — a sick girl from a poor street, her eyes emptied out, used like livestock by a brute named Ke Laoxiong. Yunfang takes her in, as if settling in Taipei a debt left unpaid in Shanghai.
The ending: one night Juanjuan picks up a flatiron and splits Ke Laoxiong's skull open, and goes mad. Yunfang visits her in the sanatorium; she sits quietly, remembers nothing, and hums the song the story is named for. The book's two exits for women stand side by side here: sell yourself at a good price, like Jin Zhaoli, or smash yourself to pieces, like Juanjuan.
Pai does not only write generals and their wives. The leads in these stories are servants, a primary-school teacher, an old soldier — and their tragedies are harder, because they never had a period of glory to be nostalgic about.
In "A Sea of Blood-red Azaleas," Wang Xiong is a hulking, near-silent man from Hunan working as a servant. He dotes on the family's small daughter, Li'er — not in any sinister sense, but because she looks like the child bride he left behind in his village when he was pressed into the army. He tends the azaleas in the courtyard with an unaccountable devotion, watering, pruning, as if he owed them something.seed ③
Li'er grows up and starts to find him dirty, coarse, embarrassing, and avoids him. Wang Xiong caves in: he smashes things in a frenzy, then attacks Xi Mei, the maid who has always mocked him, then walks into the sea and does not come back. And the year after his death, those azaleas bloom everywhere, a red that is hard to look at.payoff ③ ↑ All that idle watering and pruning finally shows its hand: he was not gardening, he was pouring the home he could not return to, and the girl in it, one dipper at a time into somebody else's courtyard; once he was gone, the account was settled at once, in the colour of blood. The one moment in the book where feeling is allowed to erupt is given to a man who cannot speak and a plant that cannot either.
"Glory's by the Blossom Bridge" is narrated by a woman from Guilin who runs a tiny noodle shop. She named it after her grandfather's old rice-noodle house by the Blossom Bridge in Guilin — his place had sedan chairs queued at the door; hers has two tables on a Taipei side street.seed ④ A regular customer, Mr. Lu, is also from Guilin: a primary-school teacher, always immaculately dressed, saving with a thrift close to asceticism, because he means to bring his fiancée out of the mainland by way of Hong Kong. He saves for more than a decade.
The money goes to a cousin in Hong Kong to arrange. The cousin takes it.
A man who was decent his whole life comes apart: he takes up with a violent laundrywoman named A Chun, is cheated and beaten by her and beats her back, gets dirtier and dirtier, and dies alone in his room. Clearing it out, the landlady finds a yellowed photograph on the wall: a young couple on a bridge, the man delicate, the woman in braids.payoff ④ ↑ That bridge is the one in the shop's name. The sign that opened the story as a piece of nostalgic decor turns out to have been a headstone — one bridge, with the landlady's grandfather's splendour at one end and, at the other, the only person Mr. Lu ever waited for. Pai nails two unrelated lives together with a place name and says nothing more about it.
Two shorter pieces work the same seam. "Ode to Bygone Days" is almost nothing but two old maidservants talking on a step, and what leaks out of their gossip is that the mansion is finished: the master is gone, the daughter ran off years ago, the son has lost his mind, weeds are coming up indoors. Handing the coroner's job to the people least entitled to comment on history is the whole point of the piece. In "New Year's Eve," the old soldier Lai Mingsheng drinks at a former subordinate's table on the last night of the year and tells the story of his battle again and again, louder each time and more like a joke; when the drink wears off he is still a man who has to report back to barracks tomorrow.
By common consent the summit of the book.
Madame Qian, born Lan Tianyu, was a celebrated kunqu opera singer in Nanjing before General Qian Pengzhi, much older, took her as his second wife. After his death she moved south to Tainan; life thinned out, her clothes are still made of the old fabrics but the cut went out of fashion long ago.
Tonight she has been invited to a banquet at the Dou mansion in Taipei. Her hostess, Madame Dou, sang beside her in the same Nanjing house as a girl — she had the lesser voice and the lesser prospects then, and has married better and lives in more style now than Madame Qian ever did. Also at the table: Madame Dou's younger sister Jiang Biyue, all in red, loud as a bonfire; and a straight-backed young staff officer named Cheng.
The wine goes round, the singing starts. Madame Qian's turn comes, and the aria is the one the story is named for, from the classic drama The Peony Pavilion — her signature piece.seed ⑤ And here the prose comes off its rails: sentences fragment, punctuation gives way, the pronoun slides between "she" and "I," and the Nanjing of thirty years ago is printed over the Taipei of tonight.
That is how we learn the old account. In Nanjing, her own younger sister used the cover of a party in her honour to take her lover — the general's young aide — away from her. She had been singing this same aria that night, on a stage, a room applauding, her mind entirely elsewhere.
The stream of consciousness recedes; the flute is still waiting. She opens her mouth, her voice has gone, and the line does not come.payoff ⑤ ↑ — And at that same table Jiang Biyue, all in red, is pouring wine for the young officer and laughing out loud. The thing that happened thirty years ago is being re-enacted in front of her, unaltered, except that this time she is in the audience. Only now does the failed note acquire its real weight: it is not that her throat is finished, it is that she has lost the right to sing that particular opera — its subject is a young woman meeting the best thing in her life in a dream, and the best thing in her life was taken from her, in front of her, on another evening.
As the party breaks up she tells her hostess something to the effect that Taipei has changed so much she hardly recognises it. That sentence is the book's signature line.
The last group belongs to men and to the old; their falls are more dignified and uglier. In "The Dirge of Liang Fu," an elder of the 1911 revolution, Wang Mengyang, has died. His old comrade, addressed as Old Pu, presides over the arrangements, particular about every rite, the coffin, the eventual reburial in the ancestral ground. The son, home from America, cannot get onto this wavelength at all — to him his father is an old man who needs burying, not a ceremony that needs completing. What the old man is defending is not a funeral but an entire order that no longer has a state to underwrite it. Old Pu plays chess in the courtyard and recites poetry, perfectly composed, while outside the wall the world has changed its arithmetic.
"Autumn Reveries" is shorter and more poisonous. A general's widow admires the chrysanthemums in her garden; the prize white variety is at its most extravagant, dazzling. She touches it — the heart of the flower has already rotted, and there are insects in it. The book's pathology report is that one flower: the exterior still holding its dignity, the inside already gone.
"A Sky Full of Bright, Twinkling Stars" takes place at night in Taipei's New Park, where the unwanted gather. Their elder is known as the Guru, once a figure in Shanghai's film world; what he cannot get past is a beautiful boy who died young. This is another kind of person swept out by the age — not someone who lost a regime, someone who lost any position he could be acknowledged in. Twelve years later Pai wrote Crystal Boys about that same park.
"Winter Nights" is the book's least merciful piece about intellectuals. On a rainy Taipei winter night, Yu Qinlei, a lame professor at National Taiwan University, receives an old classmate home from America: Wu Zhuguo, now an eminent historian. The two of them were among the students who set fire to a cabinet minister's house on May Fourth, 1919. Forty-odd years on, one is stuck in Taipei with a leaking roof, teaching a Byron he doesn't quite believe in and desperate to get abroad; the other is comfortable and honoured in America, lecturing on topics he has no appetite for and envying the man who stayed. Two young men who once set out to burn down the old China now sit in a leaking room envying each other's circumstances, and neither can get across.
The last story is "State Funeral." General Li Haoran is being buried, and his former officers arrive in ones and twos: some are generals themselves now, some have long since become nobodies. His old aide-de-camp Qin Yifang stands to one side recognising people, failing to recognise them, recognising them again, while his mind runs through the parade grounds of Nanjing. A monk walks in the procession — that is Liu Xingqi, who used to command troops and has taken orders.
The book closes inside that funeral. And it is here that you remember the woman in the first story.payoff ① ↑ Across fourteen stories people go mad, die, marry, take vows; only Yin Xueyan has not changed by a millimetre and is still dealing tiles in her mansion. Putting her first was setting a clock: every aging, every illness, every death in the thirteen stories that follow is measured against her. Time has no purchase on her, because the past does not age. Only the living do.
Taken together, only one thing is happening in this book. The migration of 1949 was not a relocation, it was a live burial: the people arrived, their time did not. Everything after is that fuse burning down — Zhu Qing swaps herself out, Jin Zhaoli sells herself off, Mr. Lu rots away, Madame Qian cannot produce the note, Qin Yifang cannot recognise the mourners. They are not living in Taipei. They are keeping vigil in Taipei over a history that has already ended, and they have kept it for twenty years.
| Story | Then (the mainland) | Now (Taipei) |
|---|---|---|
| The Eternal Snow Beauty | Star hostess at Shanghai's Paramount | Mistress of a mansion — unaltered |
| A Touch of Green | Nanjing: newly widowed, she tries to die | Another crash; she goes on eating |
| The Last Night of Taipan Chin | The Paramount; a boy called Yueru | Last night on the floor; married tomorrow |
| Glory's by the Blossom Bridge | Guilin: sedan chairs queued at the door | Two tables on a side street |
| Wandering in the Garden | Nanjing prima donna, general's wife | A widow who cannot produce the note |
| Winter Nights | Students who set the fire in 1919 | Two old men envying each other |
| State Funeral | A review on the Nanjing parade ground | A funeral where nobody knows the faces |
This is one of the most famous stream-of-consciousness passages in modern Chinese fiction. What deserves attention is the moment Pai chooses to let the language break down: not when she remembers, but when she is asked to perform.
Thousands of words before it are impeccably third-person: who arrived, who wore what, who said which pleasantry, cool as a minute-book. Then the wine goes down, the flute starts, and the narration falls into her head — clauses repeating and snapping, "she" turning into "I," dialogue from a Nanjing evening inserted directly beside this Taipei table, two parties superimposed until you can't tell who is speaking.
The technique is borrowed from Joyce and Woolf; the use of it is not. What breaks loose is not free association but a single grievance with clear causation that has been under pressure for thirty years. Western modernism often used the device to render the texture of consciousness itself; Pai uses it for something plainer — to make the reader physically undergo one instance of the past overrunning the present. Your disorientation is her condition.
Then the camera pulls back, she opens her mouth, and the note does not come. First the language collapses, then the voice disappears — a defeat staged in two movements.
Everything here rests on the choice of narrator. The story is told by Shiniang: warm, talkative, a natural busybody. She is not Zhu Qing; she can only see from outside. So the crucial stretch — the years between Guo Zhen's death and Zhu Qing's becoming someone else — is simply removed. Shiniang wasn't there, so the story doesn't have it. You get two photographs and walk the road between them yourself.
It is the cheapest and hardest move in short fiction: don't write the change, write the gap, and leave the causation to the reader — whose version is always crueller than any the author could have supplied. Choosing an obtuse narrator has a second payoff: Shiniang keeps making excuses for Zhu Qing, and through her excuses we see what she cannot. The character's dullness becomes the reader's acuity.
The easy way to write a general's funeral is to write the general's life. Pai instead mounts the camera behind the eyes of the old aide Qin Yifang — a man who doesn't even rate a place near the front. The lower the vantage, the sharper the drop: what he remembers is a parade ground in Nanjing, the length of the ranks, the shine on the uniforms; what he sees is a thinly attended hall where he identifies mourners one by one and still gets them wrong. An aide never comments on history; he cares only whether the rites are correct and who ought to stand where — and a man who cares only about rites is exactly the instrument for showing the reader that there is nothing behind them any more.
Then the monk. Nobody explains why Liu Xingqi took orders, not one line. A soldier who has become a monk: what is left out in between is louder than any account of it. The book ends there — not on a death, but on a failure to recognise.
Taipei People has no science-fictional premise, but it does have a precisely engineered device. It comes apart into three pieces.
Each story hangs simultaneously in two places, Taipei now and the mainland then. The join is the interesting part: the past never appears as a block of "memory"; it appears as an intrusion — an obsolete form of address, a place name, a tune, a bolt of unfashionable cloth. A character is speaking in a Taipei drawing room and one word drags him back to Nanjing.
Nostalgia thereby becomes a pathology rather than a posture: these people are not fondly recalling the past, they are incapable of remaining in the present.
Count them: "A Touch of Green" has Shiniang, "Glory's by the Blossom Bridge" the landlady, "State Funeral" sticks to the old aide, "Love's Lone Flower" has Yunfang, "Ode to Bygone Days" is nothing but two servants talking. The book almost never enters its protagonists' minds; there is always a layer in between. The one full-scale entry is "Wandering in the Garden" — which is precisely why that story feels so aberrant and so strong. The layer keeps the feeling under pressure: the person weeping is never the person narrating, and the narrator only relays, guesses and gossips, so the emotion gets squeezed into the seams of the sentences for the reader to pick out.
There is not a single actual Taipei native in Taipei People. Everyone in it is a mainlander carried over by the exodus of 1949; they live in Taipei and not one of them considers himself a Taipei person. The title runs backwards: history issued these people a new identity card, and the whole book is an account of their refusal to acknowledge it.
The book lays the two options out plainly. Madame Qian, Mr. Lu, Yu Qinlei, Old Pu, Qin Yifang hold on to the old identity and will accept poverty and irrelevance rather than let go; Zhu Qing and Jin Zhaoli amputate the past entirely and go on in a different body.
Take the case for forgetting first, since it is usually written up as degeneracy. In fact Zhu Qing and Jin Zhaoli are the only two people in this book who get their lives to keep working. They are not a burden on anyone, they do not sit in leaking rooms arraigning the universe, they do not treat their losses as rent owed to them by the world. And "holding on," looked at closely, is often another kind of selfishness: Old Pu keeps the rites, and the price is that his son's life has to follow his script; Yu Qinlei keeps faith with May Fourth and what he gets out of it is self-pity. Forgetting is not betrayal. Sometimes forgetting is a duty to the living: you have to put the dead down before you can go on loving anyone else.
Now the other side at full strength. Zhu Qing did survive — but who survived? The woman who would have died for Guo Zhen is gone, and what is left is a body that can sing, play mahjong and make conversation. If a person can get through a catastrophe by swapping themselves out, then "he came through it" has stopped meaning anything — the one who came through is not him. Madame Qian's insistence is undignified, but it preserves one thing: she still knows what she lost. Knowing what you lost is the last available evidence that you were not erased.
The question isn't remote. Anyone who has changed cities, changed careers, divorced or buried someone has faced it: the old photographs, the old habits, the old names — keep or discard? Keep them and you may spend a lifetime holding them up as a shield. Discard them and you may go on very efficiently, until the day you notice you can no longer remember why it hurt so much. Both sides cost, and they charge the same currency.
This is the most genuinely arguable question about the book, and the criticism it has taken most often for fifty years.
The case against, at full strength: almost everyone here belongs to a displaced ruling class — generals, staff officers, commanders' widows, the ladies of the mansions, the prima donnas, the head hostesses. What they were on the mainland, who paid for that splendour, what they did to whom: the book essentially does not ask. Pai lifts them clean out of history, writes only the pain of the fall, and scores that pain with opera, classical verse, white chrysanthemums and the cadence of Tang elegy. The result is that a political defeat gets translated into the fading of a beautiful woman. And a fading beauty has no responsible party — flowers open and close, nobody owes anybody. The political effect of that aesthetic is to substitute "time won" for "they lost," and the question of accounting is elegantly cancelled.
Now the defence, and it has to be harder than the charge. Judgement was never fiction's job; there are courts and there are historians. Fiction's job is to see — to see what a person is outside the historical role assigned to him. If literature may only depict the morally defensible, it becomes a rationed set of ethical teaching aids. More to the point: the people who fall furthest in this book are not the generals. They are Wang Xiong, Mr. Lu, Juanjuan, Qin Yifang, the two maidservants in the empty house, none of whom ever enjoyed a day of that order's benefits and all of whom were crushed under its collapse. What Pai actually wrote down is not "the grievances of a fallen elite" but "who got thrown clear when history took the corner" — and the people thrown clear never queue up by class.
The dilemma shows up in ordinary life more often than in the book: every family has the relative for whom things used to be different. Listen only to his grievance and you will miss what his era did; audit only his account and you will miss the actual old man in front of you. Having both ears is what being an adult means — and this book supplies only one of them. That is its choice, and its cost.
The characters think day and night about returning to the mainland. But Pai is explicit: what they mourn is mostly not a piece of land but the version of themselves that stood on it. Madame Qian does not want Nanjing; she wants the woman who could silence a room by opening her mouth. Mr. Lu is not waiting for an abstract homeland but for the girl in the photograph — who has also aged twenty years.
Follow that line and you reach a cold conclusion: everyone ends up living inside "you can't go back," and history has nothing to do with it. Who does not have an age they cannot return to, a friendship that dissolved, a self that no longer exists? On that reading, 1949 merely inflicted on one group, all at once and in an extreme form, something that happens to everybody. It is what gives the book its universality — it is not only a book about mainlanders in Taiwan.
But that elegant reading has a dangerous slope, and the objection deserves full force: describing a politically inflicted loss as "everyone gets old" lets history off the hook. Mr. Lu's fiancée could not be brought out because a border stood in the way, because a cousin could pocket the money without consequence, because there was a whole apparatus with no counter to complain at. Juanjuan's flatiron and Wang Xiong's walk into the sea are not the work of passing years. Translating structural harm into existential homesickness sounds more sophisticated, and the price is that specific responsibility is diluted into weather.
So the honest answer is probably: both are true, and they must be accounted separately. "Everyone loses everything eventually" is available for consolation. It is not available for settling accounts. Pai's own answer was not to go back but to build the thing again somewhere else — the place you cannot return to is gone, but you can make it grow a second time on other ground.
Line his work up and the fixation is unmistakable: he writes the aftermath of splendour — not the process of decline but what happens once it has already happened, and a person has to keep walking around inside a beautiful empty shell.
He has never hidden the source. He talks constantly about what Dream of the Red Chamber means to him, and Taipei People is very nearly an attempt to move that novel's dispersal into the twentieth century — the same banquets, the same wine and poetry, the same chill laid under the loudest moment. The difference is that Cao Xueqin wrote one family's ruin, while Pai wrote a whole population pulled up by the roots in a single historical event.
His 1983 novel Crystal Boys turns the camera on the gay teenagers thrown out of their families and living in Taipei's New Park — exactly the ground of "A Sky Full of Bright, Twinkling Stars," which is therefore not a stray piece but a door. The later story collection New Yorkers pushes the exile further out: mainland to Taipei, Taipei to New York, diaspora nested inside diaspora. And in 2012 he published a work of nonfiction about his father, Bai Chongxi, and that period of Republican history — the son who spent a lifetime writing about people on the losing side finally turning to write about the actual loser.
The other line is opera. In 2004 he produced the "Youth Edition" of The Peony Pavilion, which toured for years across the mainland, Taiwan and abroad. That project and this book are two faces of the same act: the woman who could not sing in "Wandering in the Garden" was, forty years later, given her aria back by her own author. The defeat inside the fiction, he reversed on a stage.
Without flattery: there are real charges against this book, and the people making them are not being unreasonable.
1. These are not fourteen stories; they are one event photographed fourteen times. In the migration of 1949 the people arrived and their time did not.
2. Yin Xueyan doesn't age because she isn't a person — she is the past itself, and everyone else's aging is measured against her.
3. The cruellest thing in "A Touch of Green" isn't the death. It's one woman's two responses: the first time she wants to die too, the second time she doesn't move an eyebrow.
4. The commonest way to survive is to swap yourself out — so how much is left of the sentence "he came through it"?
5. Jin Zhaoli's last dance with a stranger, without a word: twenty years of snobbery annulled in three minutes.
6. Wang Xiong wasn't growing azaleas, he was watering a home he couldn't return to. After his death the account came due in red.
7. The peak of "Wandering in the Garden" isn't the stream of consciousness — it's the missing note after it recedes. First the language collapses, then the voice.
8. The book almost never enters a protagonist's mind. What keeps it from sentimentality isn't restrained adjectives; it's a restrained point of view.
9. There are two kinds of "you can't go back": the kind time inflicts on everybody, and the kind people inflict and can be named for. Don't file the second under the first.
10. It ends at a funeral where nobody can place the faces. The real ending is not death. It is failing to recognise.