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baihe_mediaThere's a popular saying that nine out of ten Republican Era stories end in tragedy. Miss Mu and Her Pet Canary (穆小姐与金丝雀, pinyin: mu xiaojie yu jin si que) is that elusive tenth. I went into this novel not quite sure what I would be getting (there's not really a formula for happy Republican Era romances as such), and I'm glad I did, because it's definitely a serious contender for 'best baihe novel I read this year'.
The novel is set in the mid- to late-1920s, in the fictional city of Wenjiang (which has Shanghai vibes). The protagonist is Mu Xing, the titular Miss Mu. Mu Xing comes from a prominent upper-middle-class family, who are fairly progressive for the time. They're also the type of family who are known for philanthropy and good works rather than being absolutely filthy rich (in MDZS terms: think the Lans, rather than the Jins). Her father is a doctor, and both Mu Xing and her older male cousin Mu Yun have just returned from studying abroad in the US, where they both graduated with medical degrees. The path in front of Mu Xing seems clear: she'll marry her fiance Song Youcheng (a childhood friend whom she became engaged to shortly before she went abroad, more because they get on well and are a suitable match age- and status-wise rather than because they're in love), and practise as a doctor at the Mu family's charitable clinic.
An important thing to know about Mu Xing is that she's always been a tomboy, and now that she's grown up, she sees no reason to stop dressing in men's clothes (she does wear women's clothes as well, but does clearly enjoy being out and about in men's clothes). Her friends, old acquaintances and the businesses she patronises regularly know that she's 'that Miss Mu who likes running about in men's clothes'. People who meet her for the first time, however, are likely to mistake her for a man. This sets up her first encounter with her eventual love interest Bai Yan.
Bai Yan is a courtesan indentured to one of the higher-class brothels in the city. At the start of the novel, she's on the prowl for a rich, young, single, credulous man whom she can talk into buying out her indenture, establishing her in a home of her own, and potentially even marrying her. She had been cultivating a suitor called Young Master Cui, but at the start of the novel, she discovers that his father has cut him off from the family funds and arranged for him to marry a young woman from an appropriately wealthy family. Bai Yan decides to break things off with him — but not before she talks him into buying her a load of fancy jewellery as a parting gift (he doesn't know, at the time, that she intends this as a parting gift, being credulous enough to believe that Bai Yan will be wiling to carry on a relationship with him after his marriage). In a masterstroke, she even talks him into buying her farewell gift to him, a pair of cufflinks. Mu Xing, in her young man about town guise, bumps into them at the jeweller's, works out instantly what is going on, and is immediately and deeply impressed by Bai Yan's consummate skill at manipulation.
Mu Xing then makes the acquaintance of a rich young gentleman, a new arrival to Wenjiang, named Tang Yu, who believes her to be a man (Mu Xing doesn't disabuse him of this). The young men of Tang Yu's social circle are a somewhat more hedonistic bunch than Mu Xing is used to, and frequently engage the services of courtesans. It's in this context that she meets Bai Yan again — who, of course, comes to know her as 'Young Master Mu'. It's from here that their relationship unfolds. Mu Xing is initially fascinated by Bai Yan, who's obviously very different from her usual circle of acquaintances. Bai Yan, for her part, decides that the young, earnest, unattached, wealthy 'Young Master Mu' is the perfect target for her.
As the two of them see more and more of each other, they predictably begin to fall in love. Bai Yan is struck at first by how Mu Xing treats her with basic human respect (which she doesn't get much of from clients), and then by how seriously Mu Xing takes her, the way Mu Xing remembers things that she's told her, and Mu Xing's habit of arranging little gifts and surprises that she knows Bai Yan will like. For fans of cross-dressing, there is a good deal of pleasurable frission to be gained in reading about a girl being a perfect boyfriend to another girl. But it's also not an unalloyed delight for Bai Yan: she's used to treating these relationships as entirely professional transactions, and finding herself actually developing feelings for Mu Xing is something that makes her feel uncomfortably vulnerable. Mu Xing, meanwhile, comes to realise that Bai Yan has certain expectations of her (or rather, of 'Young Master Mu'), and wrestles repeatedly with the question of whether to tell her the truth. She feels very guilty about betraying Bai Yan's trust, yet she also knows that once 'Young Master Mu' is revealed to be 'Miss Mu', there will be no reason for Bai Yan to want anything more to do with her (it's men, not women, who make honest women out of courtesans, after all), and she's loath to give up Bai Yan's company. That's how she thinks of it at first anyway, as giving up Bai Yan's fascinating company. She only realises that she's fallen in love with Bai Yan when a chance encounter with a former (female) classmate who has recently caused scandal by moving in with and going through a form of marriage with another woman shows her that romantic love between two women is actually possible. The author handles the mounting tensions very well.
Bai Yan soon comes under pressure from the madam of the brothel, who holds her indenture, to set a date for (to put it bluntly) her deflowering ceremony (there are reams to be written about generic expectations, SWERFery in small but very vocal parts of the readership, and the fact that I did not find it surprising that Bai Yan is a virgin sex worker, but that's for another day). Bai Yan, in turn, starts putting pressure on Mu Xing to pay for said ceremony; she can't understand why the generous, romantic, considerate Young Master Mu would start getting cold feet at this crucial juncture. This mystery is solved when Mu Xing's dressmaker (and the 'wife' of Mu Xing's lesbian classmate, mentioned above) inadvertently lets slip that 'Young Master Mu' is in fact 'Miss Mu', and that Miss Mu is already engaged to be married to her childhood friend. Bai Yan feels deeply betrayed — and is then deeply confused when she learns that Mu Xing has not just paid for her deflowering ceremony, but also sent a note brimming over with tenderness and yearning. She's not sure why a woman would do such a thing (Bai Yan is also new to lesbianism). The first half of the book culminates in an emotionally-charged confrontation on the night of the ceremony.
To be quite honest, I was expecting the novel to slide downhill after this, since the frission and tension of the cross-dressing element was no longer in play. For my money, however, the second half is just as good, albeit in a slightly less iddy way. Bai Yan refuses to see Mu Xing after the ceremony (this leads to a great deal of prurient gossip about Young Master Mu's presumed impotence, which Mu Xing is amusingly indignant about), and resumes her project of looking for a man she can depend on financially, only to find her heart isn't in it. Mu Xing, meanwhile, is determined to gain financial independence from her family, so that she can buy out Bai Yan's indenture and give Bai Yan a home. Luckily she has some resources to hand, in particular a pharmacy which her family has gifted to her, and which she owns outright. She sets about modernising and expanding the business, and does quite a good job at it. Mu Xing also ends her engagement to Song Youcheng. This is amicable, as Song Youcheng has fallen in love with and is in a committed relationship with a Japanese dancer, and the two of them remain friends and allies.
Mu Xing and Bai Yan soon reconcile, after she makes it clear that she does have a workable plan to give the two of them financial stability and independence. In the interim, Bai Lu has also had a heart-to-heart talk with her friend Fei Hua, a fellow courtesan, who points out to her that gender doesn't really come into it: even if she managed to snag a man, he could turn out to be abusive or fickle, or fall on hard times.
Soon, Mu Xing starts making enough from her pharmacy that she can afford to basically 'rent' Bai Yan's company on an exclusive, month-by-month basis (thus getting her out of the brothel temporarily), and to buy a little apartment for the two of them. It's at this point that the story introduces one of its best, most powerful themes. Bai Yan is at first wholly delighted with her new, 'normal', respectable life, but soon realises that she wants to do something more with it. At this point, Mu Xing's ex-fiance Song Youcheng has already fallen out with his family over his insistence on marrying his dancer girlfriend, and is struggling to make a success of his fledgling publishing company. Bai Yan suggests to Mu Xing that she, Bai Yan, could help him out with editorial work (we've learned earlier that Bai Yan is a pretty accomplished writer of short stories, having had several published in good magazines). Mu Xing is dismayed when she realises that Bai Yan is, in effect, seeking her approval. It comes to her then that the financial and class differences between them mean that Bai Yan is inevitably in the more subordinate and vulnerable position in their relationship (no matter how much Mu Xing believes she considers Bai Yan her equal). She immediately sets about arranging things so that Bai Yan is able, in time, to become financially independent of Mu Xing herself. This culminates in Bai Yan being able to buy out her own indenture with her own money (so that she's not indebted to Mu Xing for her freedom), and what I'm willing to bet is one of the most romantic and feminist speeches in recent baihe history. There's also a plot thread about Mu Xing's own ambitions. At one point, she realises that she's been so caught up in making the pharmacy business a success that she's drifted away from her original goal, which was to become a practising doctor (and with the Sino-Japanese War looming on the horizon, the reader understands how significant that is). While this isn't fully addressed in the main novel, one of the extras shows her pursuing an advanced medical degree at a prestigious academy.
Both Mu Xing and Bai Yan have vividly-drawn, very likable personalities. Mu Xing is a fun combination of dashing young man about town, impetuous boarding-school girl (the idealised Enid Blyton type who are 'bricks' and 'decent' and 'honourable', not the spoiled ones who asked my friend's sister, who was there on scholarship, why she hadn't brought her own horse with her), and earnest golden retriever. Bai Yan is cynical and world-weary and street-smart, but she's also kind, has a great sense of humour and, at heart, a moving earnestness and yearning for something better that she's managed to preserve despite the horrible things life has thrown at her.
There are of course obstacles in their way. Mu Xing's family eventually becomes aware of the nature of hers and Bai Yan's relationship, and does the very traditional thing of locking Mu Xing up and forbidding Bai Yan the house. This is resolved after some (but luckily not too much) suspense by a helping hand from Mu Xing's friend Li Yining (of which more below), an assist from Mu Xing's surprisingly progressive grandmother, and the memory of Mu Xing's aunt Mu Fuxue, who died young. Mu Fuxue, it turns out, was in a lesbian relationship with opera singer Feng Yingtian (we learn at the end of the book that they addressed each other as 'wife'). When their relationship came to light, the Mu family did nothing to support them. Feng Yingtian's family eventually drove her to suicide, Mu Fuxue sank into a grief from which she never recovered and died of a debilitating illness six years later. The family's collective sorrow over Mu Fuxue leads them to treat Mu Xing and Bai Yan with much more kindness and understanding. Another obstacle is Mu Xing's female childhood friend Li Yining, who has been nursing a secret crush on Mu Xing and is horrified at Mu Xing taking up with a woman of loose morals (or so she initially thinks of Bai Yan anyway). She develops a complex, mostly off-screen relationship with Bai Yan's courtesan friend Fei Hua, and ends up helping Mu Xing and Bai Yan during the arc where Mu Xing is locked up by her family. Any lingering misgivings that the Mu family might have about Bai Yan are swept away towards the end of the novel. At this point, Mu Xing's older brother Mu Qing, who is a civil servant in Nanjing, is suddenly placed under house arrest as a result of some complex in-fighting between rival factions within the Kuomintang. Bai Yan plays an active role in freeing him, earning the Mu family's eternal gratitude.
The novel is suffused with the youthful optimism and the promise of radical progressiveness, that are commonly associated with the ideals of the May Fourth movement. Unlike, for instance, Reading the Remnants, which largely treated the Republican Era as aesthetically pleasing stage-dressing, Miss Mu and Her Pet Canary engages deeply with themes relevant to that particular period of history: the turbulence (but also liberation) brought by extreme change, the effects of modernity, the shaking-up of the classist heteropatriarchal order, the promise of freedom, and the awareness of new and more liberated ways of living. This is evident not just in the contrast between Mu Fuxue and Feng Yingtian's tragic fate and the much happier ones of the younger lesbian couples depicted in the novel, but also things like Song Youcheng's cross-class romantic relationship in the face of his family's disapproval (well done lad, for doing what even Ba Jin's 'radical young man' Gao Juehui couldn't do), and the ease with which Li Yining's sister-in-law obtains a divorce from her philandering husband (in a final-paragraph twist, she ends up in a relationship with her ex-husband's former concubine).
Stray observations:
I read the Chinese original of the novel here on JJWXC. To my disappointment, the author seems to have stopped writing completely, and this is her only complete full-length baihe novel. I am looking forward to getting stuck into the full-cast audiobook of the novel, especially since they had the good sense to cast Hei Zhi Shao in the role of Mu Xing.
The novel is set in the mid- to late-1920s, in the fictional city of Wenjiang (which has Shanghai vibes). The protagonist is Mu Xing, the titular Miss Mu. Mu Xing comes from a prominent upper-middle-class family, who are fairly progressive for the time. They're also the type of family who are known for philanthropy and good works rather than being absolutely filthy rich (in MDZS terms: think the Lans, rather than the Jins). Her father is a doctor, and both Mu Xing and her older male cousin Mu Yun have just returned from studying abroad in the US, where they both graduated with medical degrees. The path in front of Mu Xing seems clear: she'll marry her fiance Song Youcheng (a childhood friend whom she became engaged to shortly before she went abroad, more because they get on well and are a suitable match age- and status-wise rather than because they're in love), and practise as a doctor at the Mu family's charitable clinic.
An important thing to know about Mu Xing is that she's always been a tomboy, and now that she's grown up, she sees no reason to stop dressing in men's clothes (she does wear women's clothes as well, but does clearly enjoy being out and about in men's clothes). Her friends, old acquaintances and the businesses she patronises regularly know that she's 'that Miss Mu who likes running about in men's clothes'. People who meet her for the first time, however, are likely to mistake her for a man. This sets up her first encounter with her eventual love interest Bai Yan.
Bai Yan is a courtesan indentured to one of the higher-class brothels in the city. At the start of the novel, she's on the prowl for a rich, young, single, credulous man whom she can talk into buying out her indenture, establishing her in a home of her own, and potentially even marrying her. She had been cultivating a suitor called Young Master Cui, but at the start of the novel, she discovers that his father has cut him off from the family funds and arranged for him to marry a young woman from an appropriately wealthy family. Bai Yan decides to break things off with him — but not before she talks him into buying her a load of fancy jewellery as a parting gift (he doesn't know, at the time, that she intends this as a parting gift, being credulous enough to believe that Bai Yan will be wiling to carry on a relationship with him after his marriage). In a masterstroke, she even talks him into buying her farewell gift to him, a pair of cufflinks. Mu Xing, in her young man about town guise, bumps into them at the jeweller's, works out instantly what is going on, and is immediately and deeply impressed by Bai Yan's consummate skill at manipulation.
Mu Xing then makes the acquaintance of a rich young gentleman, a new arrival to Wenjiang, named Tang Yu, who believes her to be a man (Mu Xing doesn't disabuse him of this). The young men of Tang Yu's social circle are a somewhat more hedonistic bunch than Mu Xing is used to, and frequently engage the services of courtesans. It's in this context that she meets Bai Yan again — who, of course, comes to know her as 'Young Master Mu'. It's from here that their relationship unfolds. Mu Xing is initially fascinated by Bai Yan, who's obviously very different from her usual circle of acquaintances. Bai Yan, for her part, decides that the young, earnest, unattached, wealthy 'Young Master Mu' is the perfect target for her.
As the two of them see more and more of each other, they predictably begin to fall in love. Bai Yan is struck at first by how Mu Xing treats her with basic human respect (which she doesn't get much of from clients), and then by how seriously Mu Xing takes her, the way Mu Xing remembers things that she's told her, and Mu Xing's habit of arranging little gifts and surprises that she knows Bai Yan will like. For fans of cross-dressing, there is a good deal of pleasurable frission to be gained in reading about a girl being a perfect boyfriend to another girl. But it's also not an unalloyed delight for Bai Yan: she's used to treating these relationships as entirely professional transactions, and finding herself actually developing feelings for Mu Xing is something that makes her feel uncomfortably vulnerable. Mu Xing, meanwhile, comes to realise that Bai Yan has certain expectations of her (or rather, of 'Young Master Mu'), and wrestles repeatedly with the question of whether to tell her the truth. She feels very guilty about betraying Bai Yan's trust, yet she also knows that once 'Young Master Mu' is revealed to be 'Miss Mu', there will be no reason for Bai Yan to want anything more to do with her (it's men, not women, who make honest women out of courtesans, after all), and she's loath to give up Bai Yan's company. That's how she thinks of it at first anyway, as giving up Bai Yan's fascinating company. She only realises that she's fallen in love with Bai Yan when a chance encounter with a former (female) classmate who has recently caused scandal by moving in with and going through a form of marriage with another woman shows her that romantic love between two women is actually possible. The author handles the mounting tensions very well.
Bai Yan soon comes under pressure from the madam of the brothel, who holds her indenture, to set a date for (to put it bluntly) her deflowering ceremony (there are reams to be written about generic expectations, SWERFery in small but very vocal parts of the readership, and the fact that I did not find it surprising that Bai Yan is a virgin sex worker, but that's for another day). Bai Yan, in turn, starts putting pressure on Mu Xing to pay for said ceremony; she can't understand why the generous, romantic, considerate Young Master Mu would start getting cold feet at this crucial juncture. This mystery is solved when Mu Xing's dressmaker (and the 'wife' of Mu Xing's lesbian classmate, mentioned above) inadvertently lets slip that 'Young Master Mu' is in fact 'Miss Mu', and that Miss Mu is already engaged to be married to her childhood friend. Bai Yan feels deeply betrayed — and is then deeply confused when she learns that Mu Xing has not just paid for her deflowering ceremony, but also sent a note brimming over with tenderness and yearning. She's not sure why a woman would do such a thing (Bai Yan is also new to lesbianism). The first half of the book culminates in an emotionally-charged confrontation on the night of the ceremony.
To be quite honest, I was expecting the novel to slide downhill after this, since the frission and tension of the cross-dressing element was no longer in play. For my money, however, the second half is just as good, albeit in a slightly less iddy way. Bai Yan refuses to see Mu Xing after the ceremony (this leads to a great deal of prurient gossip about Young Master Mu's presumed impotence, which Mu Xing is amusingly indignant about), and resumes her project of looking for a man she can depend on financially, only to find her heart isn't in it. Mu Xing, meanwhile, is determined to gain financial independence from her family, so that she can buy out Bai Yan's indenture and give Bai Yan a home. Luckily she has some resources to hand, in particular a pharmacy which her family has gifted to her, and which she owns outright. She sets about modernising and expanding the business, and does quite a good job at it. Mu Xing also ends her engagement to Song Youcheng. This is amicable, as Song Youcheng has fallen in love with and is in a committed relationship with a Japanese dancer, and the two of them remain friends and allies.
Mu Xing and Bai Yan soon reconcile, after she makes it clear that she does have a workable plan to give the two of them financial stability and independence. In the interim, Bai Lu has also had a heart-to-heart talk with her friend Fei Hua, a fellow courtesan, who points out to her that gender doesn't really come into it: even if she managed to snag a man, he could turn out to be abusive or fickle, or fall on hard times.
Soon, Mu Xing starts making enough from her pharmacy that she can afford to basically 'rent' Bai Yan's company on an exclusive, month-by-month basis (thus getting her out of the brothel temporarily), and to buy a little apartment for the two of them. It's at this point that the story introduces one of its best, most powerful themes. Bai Yan is at first wholly delighted with her new, 'normal', respectable life, but soon realises that she wants to do something more with it. At this point, Mu Xing's ex-fiance Song Youcheng has already fallen out with his family over his insistence on marrying his dancer girlfriend, and is struggling to make a success of his fledgling publishing company. Bai Yan suggests to Mu Xing that she, Bai Yan, could help him out with editorial work (we've learned earlier that Bai Yan is a pretty accomplished writer of short stories, having had several published in good magazines). Mu Xing is dismayed when she realises that Bai Yan is, in effect, seeking her approval. It comes to her then that the financial and class differences between them mean that Bai Yan is inevitably in the more subordinate and vulnerable position in their relationship (no matter how much Mu Xing believes she considers Bai Yan her equal). She immediately sets about arranging things so that Bai Yan is able, in time, to become financially independent of Mu Xing herself. This culminates in Bai Yan being able to buy out her own indenture with her own money (so that she's not indebted to Mu Xing for her freedom), and what I'm willing to bet is one of the most romantic and feminist speeches in recent baihe history. There's also a plot thread about Mu Xing's own ambitions. At one point, she realises that she's been so caught up in making the pharmacy business a success that she's drifted away from her original goal, which was to become a practising doctor (and with the Sino-Japanese War looming on the horizon, the reader understands how significant that is). While this isn't fully addressed in the main novel, one of the extras shows her pursuing an advanced medical degree at a prestigious academy.
Both Mu Xing and Bai Yan have vividly-drawn, very likable personalities. Mu Xing is a fun combination of dashing young man about town, impetuous boarding-school girl (the idealised Enid Blyton type who are 'bricks' and 'decent' and 'honourable', not the spoiled ones who asked my friend's sister, who was there on scholarship, why she hadn't brought her own horse with her), and earnest golden retriever. Bai Yan is cynical and world-weary and street-smart, but she's also kind, has a great sense of humour and, at heart, a moving earnestness and yearning for something better that she's managed to preserve despite the horrible things life has thrown at her.
There are of course obstacles in their way. Mu Xing's family eventually becomes aware of the nature of hers and Bai Yan's relationship, and does the very traditional thing of locking Mu Xing up and forbidding Bai Yan the house. This is resolved after some (but luckily not too much) suspense by a helping hand from Mu Xing's friend Li Yining (of which more below), an assist from Mu Xing's surprisingly progressive grandmother, and the memory of Mu Xing's aunt Mu Fuxue, who died young. Mu Fuxue, it turns out, was in a lesbian relationship with opera singer Feng Yingtian (we learn at the end of the book that they addressed each other as 'wife'). When their relationship came to light, the Mu family did nothing to support them. Feng Yingtian's family eventually drove her to suicide, Mu Fuxue sank into a grief from which she never recovered and died of a debilitating illness six years later. The family's collective sorrow over Mu Fuxue leads them to treat Mu Xing and Bai Yan with much more kindness and understanding. Another obstacle is Mu Xing's female childhood friend Li Yining, who has been nursing a secret crush on Mu Xing and is horrified at Mu Xing taking up with a woman of loose morals (or so she initially thinks of Bai Yan anyway). She develops a complex, mostly off-screen relationship with Bai Yan's courtesan friend Fei Hua, and ends up helping Mu Xing and Bai Yan during the arc where Mu Xing is locked up by her family. Any lingering misgivings that the Mu family might have about Bai Yan are swept away towards the end of the novel. At this point, Mu Xing's older brother Mu Qing, who is a civil servant in Nanjing, is suddenly placed under house arrest as a result of some complex in-fighting between rival factions within the Kuomintang. Bai Yan plays an active role in freeing him, earning the Mu family's eternal gratitude.
The novel is suffused with the youthful optimism and the promise of radical progressiveness, that are commonly associated with the ideals of the May Fourth movement. Unlike, for instance, Reading the Remnants, which largely treated the Republican Era as aesthetically pleasing stage-dressing, Miss Mu and Her Pet Canary engages deeply with themes relevant to that particular period of history: the turbulence (but also liberation) brought by extreme change, the effects of modernity, the shaking-up of the classist heteropatriarchal order, the promise of freedom, and the awareness of new and more liberated ways of living. This is evident not just in the contrast between Mu Fuxue and Feng Yingtian's tragic fate and the much happier ones of the younger lesbian couples depicted in the novel, but also things like Song Youcheng's cross-class romantic relationship in the face of his family's disapproval (well done lad, for doing what even Ba Jin's 'radical young man' Gao Juehui couldn't do), and the ease with which Li Yining's sister-in-law obtains a divorce from her philandering husband (in a final-paragraph twist, she ends up in a relationship with her ex-husband's former concubine).
Stray observations:
- I want to call the second half 'Miss Bai and her Golden Retriever', as quite a bit of Mu Xing's dashing young man about town personality gives way to cheerful, resilient devotion.
- There's only one explicit sex scene (which is curently locked on JJWXC), but the author makes it clear how horny they are for each other, which I deeply enjoyed. There's a bit before they sleep together for the first time, when Mu Xing is restlessly, fretfully horny and isn't 100% able to articulate what she's feeling, which is funny and sweet and sexy (it also reminded me a lot of that bit towards the end of Coffee Prince when Eun-chan is SO horny for her boyfriend that she's almost quite literally climbing the walls).
- It is not entirely believable that the Mu family could have so little inkling of the shenanigans 'Young Master Mu' gets up to in the early part of the book, especially given the huge amounts of money Mu Xing is flinging about, but I didn't mind it too much.
- There's a moment in the book that sticks in my mind as being super sexy and intimate and I do not quite know why. This is during Mu Xing and Bai Yan's brief estrangement following the deflowering ceremony. Mu Xing, still in her 'Young Master Mu' persona, turns up at a football stadium to meet with a potential business contact. The business contact in question, it turns out, has hired Bai Yan to keep him company for the afternoon. He orders drinks for the party — three of those new-fangled foreign sodas. Mu Xing immediately speaks up, telling him that Bai Yan can't drink cold drinks at this time of the month and should have hot tea instead (the traditional Chinese belief is that you should only drink warm drinks when you're on your period. Well, the traditional Chinese belief is that you should never drink cold drinks, but especially not when you're on your period). As a possessive declaration of 'this woman belongs to ME', rawr. (weirdly I think it only works because Mu Xing is being perceived by her male romantic rival as a man. I think it loses impact if she's perceived as a woman).
I read the Chinese original of the novel here on JJWXC. To my disappointment, the author seems to have stopped writing completely, and this is her only complete full-length baihe novel. I am looking forward to getting stuck into the full-cast audiobook of the novel, especially since they had the good sense to cast Hei Zhi Shao in the role of Mu Xing.
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Date: 2025-04-27 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-30 07:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-27 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-30 07:28 am (UTC)I really liked how the vibe of the novel was so 新青年! I don't want to give the impression that it deals with the historical-social aspect in anywhere as much depth as Ba Jin's Home/Autumn/Spring trilogy — this is fundamentally a romance novel, after all, and Mu Xing's family is much much more progressive and supportive than the patriarchal nightmare that's Ba Jin's Gao family — but the general themes of modernity, feminism and independence from traditionally family models still resonate pretty strongly.
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Date: 2025-04-28 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-30 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-29 09:03 am (UTC)I had to Google what SWERF was and yeah... yeah......... I had this specific problem with the cdrama adaptation of A Dream of Splendor that I think shot its feminist themes in the foot by making the main character a "pure" kind of courtesan.
She immediately sets about arranging things so that Bai Yan is able, in time, to become financially independent of Mu Xing herself.
Awwww!
There's a moment in the book that sticks in my mind as being super sexy and intimate and I do not quite know why.
Hahahah I do like that brand of jealousy/possessiveness and I get what you mean about being specifically a male love rival in the situation.
Sorry to hear that the author quit writing. :( I do find it really cool that full-cast audiobooks are pretty common in China! Excited for you!
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Date: 2025-04-30 07:14 am (UTC)I had this specific problem with the cdrama adaptation of A Dream of Splendor that I think shot its feminist themes in the foot by making the main character a "pure" kind of courtesan.
Yeah :( They just cannot make themselves Go There. One of the many things that I really liked about the mini-drama Dong Lan Xue is that it's quite blase about the female lead not being 'pure', when she was working as a courtesan.
Hahahah I do like that brand of jealousy/possessiveness and I get what you mean about being specifically a male love rival in the situation.
Yes! I don't know why (probably patriarchy), but woman knowing about other woman's period = nothing particularly notable; man knowing about woman's period = intimate and SCANDALOUS.
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Date: 2025-04-29 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-30 07:10 am (UTC)It's on my 'may translate next' list, but considering that 'next' is probably going to be about five years later, it's difficult to make promises!
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Date: 2025-05-02 02:41 pm (UTC)lol that's more than fair! Thanks for doing such a detailed review, I really enjoyed reading it.