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“Dear Li Kuiyi, I am glad you are willing to explore with me the topic of ‘loving and being loved.’ As it happens, I have also seen the film Lust, Caution, and I was once moved by the love between Wang Jiazhi and Mr. Yi. I believe the scene in the film that best captures love is the one in the Japanese-owned tavern, where Wang Jiazhi sings Tianya Ge Nü for Mr. Yi, and the two gaze at each other for a long, long time, truly entering each other’s inner worlds.
“Why single out this particular scene? Because I believe that being seen is the very essence of love.
“As a person — the sum of all social relationships — from the moment we are born, we carry the emotional need to be seen, and it is through the process of being seen that we build a solid sense of self-identity. As Klein said, to exist is to be perceived. In this sense, a person’s entire life is indeed spent fulfilling the task of being loved.
“And yet, to be seen and accepted in one’s entirety is an idealistic thing. Far more common is the situation where, in intimate relationships, people love each other and yet do not love each other’s true selves. Even within the bonds of blood and family, we frequently find that parents love their children, but do not love the child who actually exists before them — they cannot understand what that child truly needs, and the same is often true in reverse.
“Said this way, it seems as though I am pushing the topic toward another extreme — as if being loved is a matter of extraordinary luck, with a somewhat pessimistic undertone of ‘if fate grants it, rejoice; if not, accept.’ But do not forget: as a person, we ourselves are equally the subject of love, equally capable of exploring ourselves, discovering ourselves, and accepting ourselves. Doing this well is more important than seeking love elsewhere, because it is only when we can see ourselves clearly that we can know who has truly discovered us. Going further still — when we are able to accept ourselves wholeheartedly, whether or not anyone else sees us may no longer matter.
“Even so, at this very moment, I still want to tell you: I see you!
“With warmest wishes, my Li Kuiyi, of whom I am so proud.”
The journal lay open on the desk, and this particular page had already been splattered wet by teardrops falling one after another. Li Kuiyi didn’t quite know what was happening to her — the rainy season in Liuyuan City had long since passed, yet her tears were as plentiful as ever, her eye sockets like a river that would never run dry.
How fortunate she was, to have been seen by a teacher like Liu Xinzhao.
The road the teacher had walked had not been easy either, had it? Li Kuiyi had only just learned — from a news report promoting the tuition-free teacher training program — that Liu Xinzhao had grown up with her maternal grandmother from a very young age, in quite straitened circumstances. Fortunately, the female homeroom teacher she had encountered in high school was a good person, who often gave her some financial support. So when it came time to fill in her university application, even though she could have applied for a national student loan to ease the pressure of tuition fees, Liu Xinzhao had chosen instead to enroll in the tuition-free teacher training program at Beijing Normal University, and, true to her agreement, had returned to this small city to teach after completing her master’s degree.
In that report, her name had still been Zhang Qiannan. Only now did Li Kuiyi recall: that time she had been buying magazines at the second-hand book stall outside school and had run into Liu Xinzhao and her grandmother — the grandmother had been boasting and said something like “our little Nan Nan,” and Li Kuiyi had found it strange at the time, because the grandmother’s accent was local, and there was no local custom of calling girls “Nan Nan” — so it had not been Nan Nan at all, but Nan Nan as in the character for “nan” in her name.
For personal reasons, Li Kuiyi was especially sensitive to names, and her instincts turned out to be correct — Liu Xinzhao had changed her name. Based on the small details revealed in that report, “Liu” was likely her grandmother’s surname.
Why did they both have to go through things like this?
Li Kuiyi leaned back in her chair, tilting her head back, staring blankly at the pale white ceiling.
A kind of “original sin” tied to gender — like an enormous cage — her, her, and all of them, none had escaped it. It was hard to say whether any woman truly could escape, even someone like Fang Zhixiao, who was an only child. Because Li Kuiyi thought of how classmates called the P.E. teacher “Brother Lin,” thought of the unconscious air of superiority the boys in class sometimes displayed in front of the girls, thought of how the relationship between three generations of women — her grandmother, her mother, and herself — had fallen to pieces, thought of what He Youyuan had once mentioned about the traditional pattern of male dominance and female subordination in romantic relationships, thought of what she had argued with Fang Zhixiao about — the way a woman’s center of gravity shifts once she enters a marriage or romantic relationship… All of it rushed at her at once, leaving her breathless, and making it impossible for her to deceive herself any longer.
So none of this was a coincidence, was it?
The gender prejudices she had experienced in the past had mostly been violent and overt. But now she was discovering that certain non-violent, invisible forms of gender conditioning were in fact far more common — and far harder to notice.
Li Kuiyi straightened up, grabbed the pen from the desk, opened to the latest page of her journal, and began to organize these things one by one, moving from family to school, then transitioning to society. At the end of the entry, she wrote as she thought: “I once believed that what I had been deprived of was only love from family. But now I realize that what I am truly facing is the collective disempowerment of women across every cross-section of society.”
When she finished writing, Li Kuiyi let out a long, slow breath.
She thought: if she had discovered the nature of these phenomena earlier, she would certainly have fallen into profound despair — faced with these deep-rooted and pervasive barriers, her small individual strength could change nothing at all. But perhaps because she had experienced so much recently, and thought so deeply, a headstrong impulse surged up inside her, and she believed: as long as she affirmed that she was herself, then her very existence was a form of power.
Whatever she was, the future would be the same.
“Right?” she asked Liu Xinzhao in her journal.
She set down her pen, and felt a surging sense of exhilaration sweep through her — the kind of joy that comes from fighting the heavens, fighting the earth, fighting the world, endlessly — like when she was small, chin jutting out, face scrunched up, stubbornly arguing with her grandmother. She supposed she was still too willful. But so what?
The next afternoon, after the dismissal bell rang, Li Kuiyi hurried to “Rao’s Hot and Sour Noodles” just outside the school gates. She hadn’t come here to eat in a long time. The crowd was exactly as dense as before — a dark, pressing mass of people pushing together outside the shop entrance.
Fang Zhixiao was squeezed in among them, her small frame nearly swallowed up by the crowd.
Li Kuiyi stared at her back for a moment, and couldn’t help thinking of middle school — the two of them, freshly showered, hair only half-dry, crammed together on a narrow bed reading the same novel. Their bodies had carried the same scent of shower gel; sometimes their damp hair would fall against the skin below each other’s nape, cool and slightly sticky, their breathing winding around each other.
In that closed and restless adolescence, they had been mirrors reflecting each other — observing each other’s bodies, learning each other’s likes and dislikes, envying what the other had, giving what the other lacked.
The friendship born in the particular environment of school — she didn’t know how long it could last, but she just wanted to hold on to it.
“Fang Zhixiao!” she called out.
Fang Zhixiao turned around, and the moment she spotted Li Kuiyi, her brows and eyes drooped, her mouth puckered into a pout, and she mouthed pitifully: No seats.
Li Kuiyi stood where she was, hands tucked into the pockets of her school uniform jacket, head tilted ever so slightly, her clear eyes fixed and unmoving on Fang Zhixiao — her gaze awkward and yet full of longing.
Fang Zhixiao squeezed out of the crowd and came trotting over, tilting her face up close to Li Kuiyi’s: “I’m sorry.”
Li Kuiyi let out a small “hmph” and turned her face away.
Fang Zhixiao chased her face, still tilting upward, blinking rapidly: “I’m sorry.”
Li Kuiyi turned to the other side.
Fang Zhixiao pressed herself right up against Li Kuiyi’s body, her head spinning like a little radar, following her every turn. Li Kuiyi dodged her, simultaneously craning her head as far back as she could, her ponytail sweeping back and forth across her back — and without realizing it, a laugh began to struggle up onto her face.
“I’m sorry — just forgive me, okay? Pretend what I said wasn’t said by me, but by a little dog who also happens to be named Fang Zhixiao, okay?”
Well, there was nothing to be done about it — she had always been a magnet for dogs.
Li Kuiyi thought to herself with a helpless sort of resignation.
But not many days later, Li Kuiyi began to have regrets. She felt she hadn’t performed quite to her ideal during Fang Zhixiao’s apology. According to her vision of how it should have gone, the two of them ought to have had a proper heart-to-heart with tears streaming down their faces, and then Fang Zhixiao should have wailed and cried out dramatically that she was so sorry — and only if Li Kuiyi felt she was being sincere enough would she grant her forgiveness.