Free Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang Page B

Chang’s most explicit, unsettling articulations of her views on the relationship between tidy political abstraction and irrational emotional reality—on the ultimate ascendancy of the latter over the former. Chia-chih’s final, self-destructive change of heart, and Mr. Yee’s repayment of her gesture, give the story its arresting originality, transforming a polished espionage narrative into a disturbing meditation on psychological fragility, self-deception, and amoral sexual possession.
    For until its last few pages, “Lust, Caution” functions happily enough as a tautly plotted, intensely atmospheric spy story. A handful of lines into its opening, Chang has intimated, with all the hard-boiled economy of the thriller writer, the harsh menace of the Yees’ world: the glare of the lamp, the shadows around the mahjong table, the flash of diamond rings, the clacking of the tiles. Brief exchanges establish characters and relationships: the grasping Yee Tai-tai, the carping Ma Tai-tai, the obsequious black capes, the discreetly sinister Mr. Yee. Chia-chih’s entanglement with her host is exposed with the slightest motion of a chin, her coconspirators introduced through a brief, cryptic telephone conversation, the plot’s two-year backstory outlined in a few paragraphs. At times, the reader struggles to keep up with the speed of Chang’s exposition, as characters and entanglements are mentioned then left swiftly behind: the disappointing K’uang Yu-min; the seedy Liang Jun-sheng; the bland Lai Hsiu-chin, Chia-chih’s only other female coconspirator; the shadowy Chungking operative Wu.
    The suspense reels us steadily along, through the wait in the café, the stage-managed visit to the jewelry store and the ascent to the office, and into the story’s startling finale—the section to which Chang is said to have returned most often over almost three decades of rewriting. Chang draws us artfully into her heroine’s delusion, enveloping Chia-chih’s progression toward her error of judgment in the sweet, stupefying air of the dingy jeweler’s office. Afterward we follow Chia-chih on her sleepwalk out of the store, sharing her surreal confidence that she will be able to escape quietly for a few days to her relative’s house, until we wake at the shrill whistle of the blockade and the abrupt braking of the pedicab. Mr. Yee’s return to the mahjong table brusquely exposes the true scale of Chia-chih’s miscalculation: his ruthless, remorseless response, his warped sense of triumph. “Now that he had enjoyed the love of a beautiful woman, he could die happy—without regret. He could feel her shadow forever near him, comforting him.
    Even though she had hated him at the end, she had at least felt something. And now he possessed her utterly, primitively—as a hunter does his quarry, a tiger his kill. Alive, her body belonged to him; dead, she was his ghost.”
    This final free indirect meditation echoes with Chang’s ghostly, sardonic laugher—mocking not only her weak, self-deceived heroine, but also her own gullible attachment to an emotionally unprincipled political animal. For Chang’s obsessive reworking of Chia-chih’s romantic misjudgment was, at least in part, autobiographically motivated. Like Chia-chih, Eileen Chang was a student in Hong Kong when the city fell to the Japanese in 1942, and she, too, subsequently made her way to occupied Shanghai. Also like Chia-chih, shortly after her return to Shanghai, she entered into a liaison with a member of the Wang Ching-wei government—with a philandering literatus by the name of Hu Lan-cheng, who served as Wang’s Chief of Judiciary. In 1945, a year after the two of them entered into a common-law marriage, the Japanese surrender and collapse of the collaborationist regime forced Hu to go into hiding in the nearby city of Hangzhou. Two years later, having supported him financially through his exile, Chang painfully broke off relations with him on discovering his