Red Mandarin Dress

Qutang / since I married him! A surprisingly clever and self-deprecating quote, which implied that her husband was a busy and callous one, and she was lonely here.
    “But a tide-riding young man couldn’t afford to bring you to a luxurious vacation village.”
    “How true, and how sad. My name is Sansan. I teach women’s studies at Shanghai Teachers College.”
    “My name is Chen Cao. A part-time student at Shanghai University.”
    “I like traveling. So I should consider myself lucky to have a husband capable of affording the vacation package. By the way, are you so interested in an academic career?”
    “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “You just quoted a line concerning the woman’s status in the Tang dynasty. At the time, she might not have had much choice for herself. Do you think her problem was a result of her arranged marriage?”
    “A problem of an arranged marriage? No, I think that’s too simplistic an explanation. My parents had an arranged marriage. A most happy one, as far as I know,” she said, taking another drink. “But think about the divorce rate today among young couples who have pledged their love by mountains and seas.”
    “That’s some statement from a scholar on women’s studies!” he said. “The Confucian classics talk about nothing but arranged marriage. So I wonder how the Chinese people lived for two thousand years without talking about romantic love.”
    “Well, the world is in your interpretation. If you believe it—I mean the interpretation that parents understand and always work in the best interest of the young people—you then live accordingly. Just like today: if you believe a materialistic basis is essential to any superstructure—with romantic love as a decorative vase on the mantelpiece—then you won’t be surprised by all the personal ads seeking millionaires in our newspapers.”
    “This is indeed a Chinese brand of socialism.”
    “You can say that again. Do you believe that love is something that has always been there, from time immemorial?” she said cynically. “According to Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World , romantic love didn’t exist until it was invented by the French troubadours.”
    He felt shaken, sitting there inhaling the scent of her hair. For the last few years, with one case after another on his hands, he hadn’t had much time for reading, while she like so many others had been reading things he hadn’t even heard of. Seven days up in the mountains, thousands of years down in the world . Perhaps it was already too late for him to dream of another career.
    “So are you reading Confucian classics for a project on arranged marriage?” she asked.
    “I have been reading a number of classical love stories, and there is one aspect they have in common. Inevitably, the heroines seem to be demonized in one way or another, and the love theme is thus deconstructed.” He added, “You’re a scholar in the field. Can you enlighten me on it?”
    “I like your choice of terms. Demonization of women and the deconstruction of love,” she said. “Long ago Lu Xun said something on that point. Chinese people always put the blame on women. The Shang dynasty collapsed because of the Imperial Concubine Da; King Fucha lost himself, as well as his kingdom, through the beautiful Xishi; Minster Dong Zhu fell prey to the charms of Diaochan. The list could be much longer. Even today, we all blame the Cultural Revolution on Madam Mao, though everyone is aware of the fact that without Mao, Madam Mao would have been nothing but a B-movie actress.”
    “But that’s not something one finds only in China,” Chen said. “In the West, there is a similar concept—the femme fatale. And stories of vampires too, you know.”
    “Good point. But have you noticed one difference? There are male as well as female vampires. Can you think of anything similar here? Besides, the femme fatale isn’t the most common image of women in the mainstream of Western thought, not the most important one in the dominant or official discourse.”
    “That’s true. Arranged marriage was definitely an inherent part of Confucianism. So do you think that the stories in question became distorted under the influence of those dominant ideologies?”
    “And those lovely women cannot but be crushed—in one way or another. It cannot be helped.”
    “Cannot be helped—” he echoed as he thought of the case again.
    Perhaps an author was somehow like a serial killer,