《一吻》笔记
- 王长简(Wang Chang-jian, 1910-1988)，笔名(pen name)：师陀(Shi Tuo)
- Among other things, the story deals with human memory that can play tricks on people’s mind, when the conscious mind shapes or colors the way past events are remembered as worse or better than what they were. To that extent, the story is an antidote to romanticism or idealism as a form of self-deception
- Sister Liu has fond memory of the kiss that Tigerfish gave her when she was 17 years old, mainly because she is now not very happy with the marriage (and widowhood), which is the main point of Theodore Huters, my graduate dissertation advisor, in his article titled The Telling of Shi Tuo’s ‘A Kiss’: Few Words and Several Voices. In other words, a life devoid of passion and love is psychologically compensated and adjusted to through the remembrance the kiss, which at the time didn’t mean much to Tigerfish or Sister Liu. The meaning of the kiss received in the past reflects more about her current existence as a widow than what really happened many years ago.
- What is interesting about Sister Liu is that her experience itself is a sequel to her mother’s bad life choice, “she was terrified that the daughter had mother’s blood flowing in her veins”. The mother eloped with someone of low social status whom she never married. She lived an impoverished life, with only her daughter as a ticket to her retirement in old age. In other words, the mother’s “mistake” is paid or over-compensated (over-corrected) by a life of relative wealth with no love on the part of the daughter. Sister Liu becomes a concubine to an assistant to the local magistrate.
- This is the art of Shi Tuo to dramatize the crisis of Chinese consciousness in people torn between free love and individual choices on the one hand, and the stubborn reality of Chinese traditions on the other. This cautionary tale about Chinese social reality that is very much like Lu Xun’s Regret for the Past as a cautionary story for all the progressives only seeing what they wanted to see.
- Tigerfish, oh the other hand, has no memory whatsoever about the kiss that he gave to the very lady he was pulling on his rickshaw many years later. He is no longer a blacksmith’s assistant and has no memory of who he kissed long ago, as Sister Liu finally realizes. She comes back to Orchard City to see what never was. Tigerfish didn’t even realize whom he was pulling until he saw a wad of money in his hand.
- Here is perhaps the lesson that Shi Tuo wanted to offer, in a new age (of the Republic) when people had so much to hope for. But realities can remain the same despite our ardent desires for social change. The last sentence where Shi Tuo speaks directly to the reader reminds people of our human propensity for romanticizing (in the form of nostalgia) so as to cope with the despair of the present, which may be the nature of love for both Mother Liu and Sister Liu. The mother’s willfulness to elope with someone she thought she loved results in her status of “unmarried woman with a child”; this path to an undignified life begets another life of security and relative comfort but without so much as a meaningful kiss.
- Do remember these instances of Chinese ambivalence to social change.