NANJING 1937
A Love Story
By YE ZHAOYAN
Translated by Michael Berry. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 355 pages, $24.95

reviewed by Allan H. Barr

Ye Zhaoyan, born in 1957, has since the 1980s established a reputation in mainland China as a versatile and prolific fiction writer, and he also enjoys popularity in Taiwan, where a number of his books have been reprinted. In the United States, however, he is largely unknown. With this translation of Nanjing 1937, an historical novel originally published in China in 1996, Michael Berry gives English-language readers a chance to encounter Ye's fiction through one of his most ambitious works to date.

Some of Ye Zhaoyan's earlier fiction, notably his 1988 novella "Tale of the Jujube Tree," displays the interest in narrative experimentation common among such contemporaries as Mo Yan and Su Tong. In Nanjing 1937, however, Ye favors a more conventional storytelling mode. As the novel opens, a gifted linguist named Ding Wenyu, scion of an elite family who has recently returned to China after lengthy study in the West, catches sight of the gorgeous young daughter of a distinguished official at a New Year's Day reception and immediately falls in love with her. The stage is set for that most familiar of situations in popular Chinese narrative, the "scholar-beauty" romance. In time-honored tradition, all kinds of obstacles stand in the way of the love-struck hero. Not only is Ding already married, but Ren Yuyuan, the object of his affections, has just taken a husband. Ding's father, who had arranged his marriage, is naturally opposed to its dissolution, and the Ren family looks askance at his pursuit of Yuyuan. As if these complications do not make life difficult enough, Ding also has bigger problems with which to contend. His home, after all, is Nanjing, and the year that has just begun is 1937, the year that will see Japan's invasion of China and culminate in the infamous Rape of Nanjing. The story's spatial and temporal setting ultimately elevates it from the "scholar-beauty" form to the grander scale of romance in an age of national cataclysm.

The story proceeds on two levels. Ye follows the conflict between the individual protagonists at the same time as he monitors events on the wider stage, tracing the ominous path that leads to war between China and Japan. Matters of the heart and affairs of state are juxtaposed and fruitfully intermingle. Like Woody Allen's Zelig, the movie character who blended into 1930s newsreel footage, Ding Wenyu is made to rub shoulders with prominent figures of the day. His fluency in foreign languages captivates Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and he is given a privileged place in the audience when the Generalissimo delivers an important address. He goes to an opera starring the celebrated performer Mei Lanfang, and acts as interpreter for Tang Shengzhi, commander of the Nanjing garrison on the eve of the Japanese assault in December 1937. An impressive montage is created as fact and fiction are skillfully integrated into a single narrative.

Nanjing 1937, as it turns out, is at its best when Ye Zhaoyan is sketching the backdrop. The central love story, by contrast, is rather a disappointment. For Ye's magisterial narrative voice, helpfully authoritative when guiding the reader through the ins and outs of modern Chinese history, proves tiresome when relating the details of Ding's epic love affair. Ye seems to have little confidence that his characters can be left to speak for themselves, and instead tends to paraphrase their remarks and summarize their psychological state, with the result that they never quite come alive as real people. Such a dominant narrative voice is also something of a liability when commentary teeters on the brink of triteness ("There isn't a woman in the world who doesn't like hearing compliments from men") or condescension ("Women always seem to know what to say to tear another woman apart; it's almost an inherent instinct").

There is a larger problem, too, with the book's conception of the main characters, particularly Ding Wenyu. Ding, we are told, is a kind of Chinese Casanova, the veteran of countless escapades during his many years of bachelorhood in Europe, where he has enjoyed high life and low life, hobnobbed with Hemingway and Pound, and seduced women right and left. Sangfroid, one would think, should be his stock in trade. But, at almost every stage of his courtship of Yuyuan, we find him unaccountably "dumbfounded," "speechless," "stunned," "in shock," "petrified," or "panic-stricken." At times, the other personalities also struggle to retain credibility in situations that are too obviously contrived.

In his afterword, Ye Zhaoyan reveals that it was his original intention to write "a novel that chronicled the actual events of that year, an annalistic record of the ancient capital Nanjing in 1937," and he speaks apologetically of the romance that emerged, uninvited, from the writing process. According to Ye, there is always something comical and ridiculous about love in a time of war, and it may be precisely this assumption (erroneous, surelyjust think of Ian McEwan's Atonement) that diminishes his characters and deprives his story of the emotional weight one might expect it to carry. Yet, despite its flaws, Ye's novel does succeed in painting an evocative picture of China's capital on the eve of the Japanese onslaught. The reimagining of life in Republican China has been a major concern in contemporary Chinese fiction, and to this body of work Nanjing 1937 is a distinctive addition.