Basic human needs – for love, for connection, for self-determination – underlie Lisa See’s historical fiction. She mines a rich vein with stories of Chinese women cloistered by societal restriction. In “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” she explored the society shaped by foot-binding and the connections women shared through a secret language. In “Peony in Love,” she focuses on love and self-expression, setting her story during the upheaval of the Qing Dynasty in the 17th century.
Chen Tong – Peony – is an only child, a young woman so privileged that “even my maid had bound feet.” Two days shy of her 16th birthday, she is in a state of high excitement. Her father has arranged for a performance of an epic romantic opera, “The Peony Pavilion,” at the family compound. The 20-hour work has been condensed to a three-evening series, reaching its finale on the evening of the lovers’ festival known as the Double Seven.
“The Peony Pavilion” is the story of Du Liniang, a young woman who dreams of a handsome scholar and who pines away because she cannot realize her dream. Her ghost is eventually brought back to life by the man she thought she could never have. It is a work of tragedy, passion and salvation, and one celebrating qing, the idea of “deep emotions and sentimental love.”
It was a work widely read by the educated young woman of the time, and Peony is hardly immune to its call. She has collected nearly every edition of the work, and she adds her own commentary to its margins. She identifies, with all the idealistic romanticism of a teen, with its heroine.
She is five months from entering an arranged marriage and seems to accept that reality – until the first night of the opera. Sitting with the women behind the screens that shield them from view, she glimpses a young man in the crowd. In his gestures she imagines much, “gentleness, refinement, and a love of poetry … He was man – beautiful.” And in that moment, Peony changes from a dutiful daughter to a lovesick maiden.
Her desire for the unnamed young man undoes her life. They meet, by chance, that first night, and deliberately the next, against all convention. By the third evening, Peony’s mother realizes something is amiss, and she locks the recalcitrant daughter in her room. It is too late. Peony cannot follow the path chosen for her. Like her heroine, Du Liniang, she loses interest in life. Instead of going to her future dressed in wedding garments, she is robed in funeral attire.
Peony finds no relief in death, discovering instead that the wants and needs of life had traveled with her across the divide: “Death, rather than quelling my emotions, had intensified them. The Seven Emotions we talk about on Earth – joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate and desire – had traveled with me to the afterworld. These ancestral emotions, I saw, were more commanding and enduring than any other force in the universe: stronger than life, more persistent than death, more powerful than what the gods can control, floating about us without beginning and without end. And while I was awash in them, none was stronger than the sorrow I felt for the life I lost.”
Peony’s soul exists in three parts: one stays with her body, now buried; one is set to journey into the next world; and one should reside in the ancestral tablet, where it is to be venerated by the family. But the ancestral tablet must be ceremonially dotted, an act her grieving parents overlook. As a result, her soul cannot travel to the next world. Peony is condemned to wander as a hungry ghost.
It is in this form that Peony learns the lessons she would have learned had she lived, and her voice and emotions mature as she rises to accept the challenges of death. She travels through stages of grief and jealousy before finally coming to acceptance, and in this she discovers the love that she had not had a chance to experience in life.
In an author’s note at the end of the novel, See offers an explanation of the history that underpins this work: “There are several elements here – Tang Xianzu’s opera (“The Peony Pavilion”), the lovesick maidens, the history of The Three Wives’ Commentary, and the societal changes that allowed it to be written.”
Much of the power of her story lies in the meeting of its foreign, unfamiliar roots with the realization that human needs truly transcend time and culture. It is tempting to say that only women have a need to exert control over their destinies, but that is hardly the case. Humans need to feel some control over their lives; cutting off one path to fulfillment can simply cause the force to be sent down a different channel. Peony’s story transcends time and gender, reflecting a reality in which women, having little control over their destinies, time and again take control over the one part they can – their bodies.
Robin Vidimos reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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FICTION
Peony in Love
By Lisa See
$23.95
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IN TOWN
Lisa See is scheduled to appear at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 7 at the Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St.; and at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 8 at the Tattered Cover Book Store, 1628 16th St., Denver.
