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“When I first finished reading Zhang Ailing’s ‘Lust, Caution,’ I believed that Mr. Yi did not love Wang Jiazhi. How could he have, if after having her killed he could still feel so self-satisfied, even faintly flushed with a kind of pleasure? Zhang Ailing herself wrote that theirs was a primal relationship of hunter and prey, of demon and ghost, the most ultimate form of possession.

“So when I watched the film ‘Lust, Caution,’ I was startled to find that I could detect something like love in this relationship. Director Ang Lee’s touch was too gentle; at the film’s close, he allowed Mr. Yi to enter the room where Wang Jiazhi once stayed, to run his fingers slowly over the bedsheets, his eyes silently glistening. In that moment, my heart broke open alongside Wang Jiazhi’s in that jewelry shop, and I thought — he truly did love her.

“I did not know whether the love in the film was something Ang Lee had invented, or whether I had missed something in the novella, so I retrieved the collected works and read ‘Lust, Caution’ again.

“In this relatively brief story, performance is the thread that runs through everything. The female lead, Wang Jiazhi, is a devotee of the stage. On it, she is the lead actress — luminous, magnetic, impossible to look away from. When the curtain falls and everyone else has dispersed, she alone cannot leave, as though she is the only one still dreaming while all the world is awake. She takes on the role of a spy, too, for the sake of that intoxication — she even finds, bathed in the afterglow of the stage lights, that she no longer quite hates the disagreeable Liang Runsheng. For the sake of performing this role to perfection, she willingly resolves to sacrifice her body. The performance carries her to its extreme, and like Zhuangzi lost in his dream of a butterfly, she can no longer say what is real and what is the play.

“Using one’s life to stage a grand performance is a recurring narrative in Zhang Ailing’s fiction — as in ‘Farewell My Concubine,’ where Lady Yu plunges the blade into her own chest and says: ‘I prefer an ending like this.’ A magnificent and beautiful curtain call is the most enduring element of any tragedy. ‘Lust, Caution’ is no different — except that in this story, the one who drives the performance to its peak is not Wang Jiazhi, but Mr. Yi.

“Mr. Yi has never lacked for women. He is an old hand at accompanying them to buy things, and in his view, all of this is merely a product of his power and status. His relationship with Wang Jiazhi is no exception — from Hong Kong to Shanghai, it is a gorgeous and improbable encounter, but an encounter in a play, nothing more. The turning point comes when, in that moment between life and death, Wang Jiazhi lets him go inside the jewelry shop. He returns home shaken, yet somehow astonished, and understands: Wang Jiazhi must truly love him — otherwise she would never have abandoned an assassination plan two years in the making just to save him. The realization fills him with a soaring elation. To think that in middle age he should still be capable of such an encounter — he, too, has fallen into this play, and cannot find his way out.

“From there, all that follows is inevitable. She loves him, therefore he will have her killed. For a man of Mr. Yi’s extraordinary self-regard and self-love, killing her is the only way to possess her completely. He is not afraid that Wang Jiazhi will hate him for it — because he believes that if he were not this kind of man, she could not have loved him. She dies at the moment of her love for him, and so that fleeting love becomes eternal. At last she becomes his ghost, and she and her love will follow him and cling to him forever.

“Love frozen at its most glorious moment — that is this performance’s most perfect final act.”

Li Kuiyi put down her pen and pressed her fingers gently against her brow. On the desk, a single lamp glowed softly. In the small bed beside her, Fang Zhixiao was sleeping soundly, her chest rising and falling with each steady breath.

Perhaps because she had cried so much during the film, her eyes felt very dry now. Yet she had no desire to sleep — she wanted to keep writing, but found she couldn’t, so she jotted down the date, and the journal entry that had never found its ending came to an abrupt stop.

She leaned back in her chair and sat in a kind of reverie for a long time.

After a while, she picked up her pen again:

“The above represents only one way of reading the novella ‘Lust, Caution.’

“In the film, perhaps because of how clearly it is laid out, the love of Mr. Yi is stripped of some of its distorted and shadowy quality, and becomes something almost moving. Most of all, the film gives Wang Jiazhi a more defined personal history: abandoned by her father, fleeing through the turmoil of war, arriving as a charity student at a school in Hong Kong… A girl, solitary and adrift, who could only become the leading lady when she stepped onto a stage, and in that role receive admiration, respect, and love. She had never been given any of these things before, and so she grew hungry for them. Perhaps it was also for this reason that in the false game laid with the ‘beauty trap,’ Mr. Yi’s love became the most vivid and irreplaceable element of all.

“Love is always moving, being loved is always comforting — whether in the novella or in the film, whenever I glimpsed a trace of love in their story, I felt something loosen in my chest for Wang Jiazhi, as though even in dying, she had nothing left to regret. But this very thought unsettled me — stepping out of the fiction, I felt something narrow and limiting in myself, as though the whole of a person’s life amounted to nothing more than completing the task of being loved.

“I remind myself to keep a distance from works of art. These loves capable of toppling cities and nations are nothing but reflections in a mirror, flowers in water. Return to reality, and love is flesh and blood, appetite and desire. But how easy is it, really, to step back? My eyes have already been dazzled by those blossoms, and when I imagine what love might be, it still blazes — every gesture, every glance engraved bone-deep.”

Li Kuiyi put down her pen again.

It was already five in the morning. Through the crack in the curtains, she could make out a thin black sliver of sky. She stared at it for a while, and felt an unexpected stillness inside. Her eyes returned to the journal, and she fell into thought — wondering whether she could show this to Liu Xinzhao.

Would Liu Xinzhao think: you’re fifteen years old, why are you spending your energy thinking about love instead of your studies?

Or would she think: you’re fifteen years old — what business do you have watching Lust, Caution? Very naughty.

Li Kuiyi instinctively felt that Liu Xinzhao would think neither of these things. Whether that was trust or simply a longing to be trusted, she couldn’t quite say.

Leave it for now, she thought, closing her journal.

She still felt no sleepiness, so she went back to bed, propped herself up, and reached for one of the books piled at the head of the bed at random — it turned out to be Wang Anyi’s “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow.” She had already read this one before, but with nothing to do, leafing through it would at least pass the time. When she opened to the first page, three lines met her eye:

March 15, 2010

Purchased at Boya Bookstore

Su Jianlin

Li Kuiyi remembered then — this book had been left here by Su Jianlin. She had mentioned it to him afterward, and he had said she could keep it. And so it had stayed, becoming the first Wang Anyi book she had ever read.

Later she had started doing what he did — writing the date and place of purchase inside the front cover of every book she bought.

She turned the pages slowly. There were notes she had made during her previous reading — she had never liked using notebooks, preferring to mark directly in the book itself, with the occasional thought written in the margins. Looking at those notes now, she found them laughably naive, and even her handwriting looked less elegant than she remembered.

And so she read, and remembered, until the sky turned light.

Fang Zhixiao slept until past ten. After all that crying the night before, when she opened her eyes both eyelids had swollen into triple-creased mounds — slightly absurd-looking. Li Kuiyi saw it and couldn’t help laughing. Fang Zhixiao, convinced she had eye discharge, rubbed and rubbed, and kept asking: “Is there still some? Is there still some?”

After washing up, Fang Zhixiao pulled out a brand-new entertainment magazine from her bag, and the two of them huddled over the celebrity gossip together. They hadn’t been reading for long when the bedroom door was pushed open a small crack, and they looked up to find Li Kuiyi’s younger brother, Li Zhuoyi, clinging to the door frame and peering cautiously inside.

Li Kuiyi’s little brother’s name was Li Zhuoyi. Six years ago, when Li Kuiyi had first learned his name, she had been overjoyed — the name was so obviously chosen to match hers, and the pairing gave her a feeling of belonging, of being truly part of the family. It was a moment when she had thought, like Wang Jiazhi: they really do love me.

She and her brother weren’t close. Xu Manhua handled everything related to her son personally and directly, and Li Kuiyi almost never took the initiative to interact with him. Perhaps she was too immature, or perhaps too petty-hearted — watching the tenderness lavished on him, a tenderness that had never been hers, she couldn’t manage complete equanimity.

The chocolates He Youyuan had given her, she hadn’t shared with her brother either. They were sitting in her drawer — and fortunately the weather was cold enough that they wouldn’t melt.

Fang Zhixiao looked up, spotted Li Zhuoyi, and made a face at him, the kind meant to startle. But Li Zhuoyi, instead of being startled, apparently took it as playful teasing, because he broke into a wide grin and giggled, showing a mouthful of ruined teeth.

The laughter brought Xu Manhua. She saw her son standing in Li Kuiyi’s doorway, pushed the door fully open — the wooden door swung into the wall with a loud bang — and her scolding followed immediately: “What are you standing there for? Watch you don’t get your hand caught!”

The words were addressed to the son, but the tone implied something else — as though Li Kuiyi were somehow to blame for letting the boy stand there.

“Lunch,” Xu Manhua said, and pulled Li Zhuoyi away.

At the table sat only four people; Li Jianye wasn’t there, eating his lunch at the shop. Xu Manhua was trying to spoon food into Li Zhuoyi’s mouth, but he shook his head and refused — said he would only eat after going to play in the inflatable castle that afternoon. Xu Manhua scolded him a few times, calling him a troublesome child, but agreed to it all the same.

Li Kuiyi scooped a couple of bites and said: “We have a parent-teacher meeting tonight.”

Xu Manhua frowned: “A parent-teacher meeting, in the evening?”

“It’s scheduled at this time for all classes in the grade,” Li Kuiyi said.

“How am I supposed to go? I can’t just leave your brother home alone.”

Fang Zhixiao spoke up: “What about Uncle? Can’t he go?”

“He has to watch the shop.”

An eyeglass shop. It wouldn’t hurt to close for one evening — but the real reason was that neither of them wanted to go, and both Li Kuiyi and Fang Zhixiao knew it perfectly well. Still, Li Kuiyi genuinely wanted Xu Manhua to come. She wanted her mother to see the wall of honors covered with her photographs, to hear every one of her teachers heap praise on her without reservation — as if that could prove she had won somehow: even if you never paid attention to me, I am still shining.

Fang Zhixiao put on her most casual, cheerful voice: “You’re very calm about this, Auntie. Do you know what place Li Kui got? First place — first in the whole city! If I got a score like that, my mom wouldn’t just go to the parent-teacher meeting — she’d march around the whole neighborhood for three days straight with a megaphone. And I could ask her for the moon and she’d try to pull it down for me. Looking at it that way, there’s really no benefit to being a top student — at least us bad students get prizes whenever we improve. Ha! Li Kui, you’re this incredible, and still somehow this hard done by!”

The words landed oddly on Xu Manhua — even if the tone was breezy, the meaning was clear enough. Wasn’t this saying she was a mother who didn’t pay enough attention to her own daughter?

Xu Manhua’s expression cooled.

Fang Zhixiao pressed on: “My mom loves Li Kui. I told her Li Kui was first in the city again, and she said she’d throw me out and go to Li Kui’s parent meeting herself. My mom is very vain about these things — she was imagining it: going to a parent-teacher meeting as Li Kui’s mother, being praised by every teacher, being the envy of every other parent in the room — sitting there like the Buddha radiating golden light. And honestly, the image is tempting even to me.”

Xu Manhua stirred the rice with her spoon, scooped it into her son’s mouth, and said: “I see what you mean. But Li Kuiyi studies well, so her father and I aren’t worried. The point of a parent-teacher meeting is to discuss any academic concerns — Li Kuiyi has none, so there’s no particular need for us to go.”

Fang Zhixiao: “…”

Exasperating. A cunning adult who had swallowed more salt than she had eaten rice.

Fang Zhixiao was never one to beat around the bush, and now she’d had enough of it. She burst out directly: “How is there no need to go? Does doing well in school mean Li Kuiyi doesn’t need to be cared about? You really shouldn’t play favorites so obviously — I’m just…”

Li Kuiyi set down her chopsticks and said coldly: “Fang Zhixiao.”

Fang Zhixiao went still. She looked at Li Kuiyi — a face that was already cool-tempered, now carrying a few degrees of something sharper — and felt a small jolt of unease. Then she looked at Xu Manhua, whose face had gone stiff. Strangely, in that moment, the mother and daughter looked more alike than they ever usually did.

Li Kuiyi stood up, walked to the bedroom under Fang Zhixiao’s uncertain gaze, and came back a moment later with both their school bags. She said evenly to Xu Manhua: “Whether you go or not is entirely up to you. If you decide not to, please remember to call my homeroom teacher and give a reason.”

Then she took Fang Zhixiao by the arm and, under Xu Manhua’s stunned and indignant stare, walked out the front door.

The two of them walked in silence for a long, long time. Fang Zhixiao kept her head low and didn’t dare meet Li Kuiyi’s eyes. The more she thought about it, the more frustrated she was with herself — why couldn’t she have kept her head, why had she let things come to this, why did she have to say what she said? She had had her moment of release, and what about Li Kuiyi? Li Kuiyi still had to go home to that house.

“I’m sorry…” Fang Zhixiao felt tears rushing up.

“I’m not angry at you,” Li Kuiyi said.

After a pause, she continued: “I mean it. The things you said — they weren’t far from what I think myself. I’m just a coward. I can’t say those things to them. You said them. That’s not nothing.”

She wasn’t consoling Fang Zhixiao. She genuinely meant it.

She was someone who was very direct with most people. If He Youyuan pulled her hair or flicked her forehead, she would tell him plainly to stop. But with her family it was different. In front of them, she shrank — she was the one who came begging. Thank goodness she wasn’t a dog; she had no tail to wag. And thank goodness she wore a naturally cold face — otherwise she would have given herself away long ago.

So it was a good thing, in its own way, that Fang Zhixiao had said it.

Fang Zhixiao still didn’t quite believe her, and looked at her with tearful eyes.

Li Kuiyi smiled and held out one of the school bags: “Carry your own — it’s heavy.” Then she looked around, spotted a spicy hotpot restaurant, and said: “Still hungry? I’ll treat you to more food.”

Fang Zhixiao wiped her eyes and pouted: “Fine.”

After lunch, the two of them took a bus to the city library. Fang Zhixiao was there to do homework; Li Kuiyi had already finished hers and just wanted to read. Li Kuiyi proactively offered her own Chinese exam paper: “If you don’t feel like doing it, just copy mine.”

This was unmistakably a peace offering. Fang Zhixiao finally blinked away the last of her tears and smiled.

Students generally hated Chinese homework — too much to write — and Chinese teachers were thought of as the more lenient ones when it came to assignments. But Li Kuiyi was someone who did her Chinese homework carefully, writing out even the classical poetry fill-in-the-blank sections stroke by careful stroke.

Fang Zhixiao pulled out her Chinese exam paper and began to transcribe. Li Kuiyi leaned over the table and started reading a book on the history of the Song dynasty. The afternoon sun came through the windows, warm but not harsh — that was the gift of autumn, the weather dry and clear and crisp.

About halfway through copying, Fang Zhixiao suddenly heard a faint, muffled sniffling from beside her. Like someone quietly weeping.

She looked over. Li Kuiyi was staring at a book, and tears were falling steadily, one after another, landing on the deep-grained wooden surface of the library table, forming little raised drops.

Oh no. She really was hurting after all. Fang Zhixiao’s heart clenched.

She passed her tissue after tissue, but the tears didn’t seem to slow — streaming steadily, uncontrollably. The sight of it made Fang Zhixiao want to cry herself. She had truly made a terrible mistake today. With no other option, she pulled Li Kuiyi out of the reading area to a spot outside where talking was allowed, bracing herself to offer comfort and a heartfelt apology.

Li Kuiyi, being dragged along, sniffled and looked up: “What is it?”

Fang Zhixiao’s voice came out choked: “Stop crying, okay? It’s all my fault, I was too reckless, I’m so sorry.”

“But I said I wasn’t blaming you.”

“I know, but seeing you cry makes me miserable too…”

Li Kuiyi broke into laughter through the tears: “Do you think I’m crying because of that?”

“What else would it be?”

“…I was reading about Wang Anshi’s reform just now, and I felt so sorry for him. He was all alone, no one standing with him. Do you know — not a single person was on his side.”

She sniffled again as she said it.

Fang Zhixiao let out a sound, raised her fist, and thwacked her: “You owe me emotional damages!”

During the evening study period, the students worked below while Liu Xinzhao prepared the classroom above for the parent-teacher meeting. She picked up a piece of chalk and wrote a few welcoming words on the board, then drew some decorative patterns around them. The students occasionally lifted their heads to glance at her and murmur among themselves.

By the second study period, parents were already waiting outside. They pressed their faces to the window, craning to see where their own child was sitting, checking whether they were studying diligently.

The students, too, gradually grew restless.

At last the second period ended. Liu Xinzhao announced: “Everyone go to Room 501 on the fifth floor. I’ll give you an essay prompt. Once you’ve finished, hand your essay in to the class representative — and then—”

She let the pause hang, drawing out everyone’s anticipation.

Liu Xinzhao smiled: “Turn in your essay, and you can go down to the sports ground and run free.”

“Hooray—!” The room erupted.

Liu Xinzhao rapped on the lectern: “But — you are not allowed to disturb other classes. The sports ground and only the sports ground. And be back five minutes before dismissal. Is that understood?”

“Understood!” Everyone shouted cheerfully and scrambled to pack their bags.

“Xia Leyi, please organize the parents and bring them in. Li Kuiyi, come with me to the office for a moment,” Liu Xinzhao said.

The classroom doors opened, students poured out, were briefly intercepted by waiting parents, made a few awkward exchanges, and slipped away. Li Kuiyi followed Liu Xinzhao to the office, where Liu Xinzhao handed her the stack of exercise books: “If you finish your essay first, go have fun — let the others just leave theirs on the desk. Don’t be silly and wait for them.”

Li Kuiyi laughed sheepishly: “Oh, alright.”

She had just gathered the exercise books and was turning to leave when someone came squeezing through the office doorway toward her — and it was Xu Manhua.

Li Kuiyi’s eyes went wide. Before she could even finish being shocked, she watched Xu Manhua walk straight to Liu Xinzhao’s desk, smile warmly, and say: “Hello, Teacher Liu. I’m Li Kuiyi’s mother.”

Liu Xinzhao was mildly surprised but showed nothing, glancing once at Li Kuiyi and once at the woman in front of her, then extending her hand: “Hello, hello. Please sit.”

Xu Manhua settled into an empty chair and asked: “Li Kuiyi — she’s been behaving herself at school, hasn’t she?”

Liu Xinzhao said with a smile: “This child — there isn’t a thing to criticize. She’s outstanding in every way.”

“Good, good.” Xu Manhua smiled along, and then furrowed her brow slightly: “I was a little worried, I’ll admit! Teacher, you don’t know — this child has very strong opinions of her own. She looks well-behaved on the surface, but she can be quite stubborn. The smallest thing that doesn’t suit her and she won’t let it go.”

“Is that so?” Liu Xinzhao responded lightly, glancing toward Li Kuiyi, who was still standing by the office doorway. She stood there holding the stack of exercise books, neither leaving nor staying, her fingers wrapped tightly around them — at a loss for what to do.

Xu Manhua spoke as if sharing an amusing story, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes crinkling in her smile: “Oh, how could she not be? Stubborn as anything! When she sat for her middle school graduation exam, the school gave her an award of 100,000 yuan — and would you believe it, we as her parents never so much as laid eyes on a single coin of it. 100,000 yuan — in the hands of a child. If you told people that, they’d never believe it.”

Liu Xinzhao didn’t respond directly. She looked at Xu Manhua, the warmth in her eyes going quiet and faint. Then she beckoned to Li Kuiyi: “Is that so?”

Li Kuiyi stood with her eyes downcast, fingers working at the edge of the exercise book in her hands. After a long moment, she gave a small nod.

Liu Xinzhao got to her feet and placed an affectionate hand on Li Kuiyi’s head: “Look at you — that capable.”

Then she turned back to Xu Manhua: “A child with that much initiative is genuinely rare. As her parents, you should do everything you can to nurture it. Now — the meeting is about to begin. Shall we head to the classroom, Li Kuiyi’s mother?”