Lust, Caution (6 page)

Mr. Yee stood behind his wife, watching the
game. After he had stubbed out his cigarette, he took a sip of his tea; still too hot. Though an early night was surely what he needed, he was overtired, unable to wind down. He was exhausted from sitting by the phone all afternoon waiting for news; he hadn’t even had a proper dinner. As soon as he’d reached safety, he’d immediately telephoned to get the whole area sealed off. By ten o’clock that evening they’d all been shot. She must have hated him at the end. But real men have to be ruthless. She wouldn’t have loved him if he’d been the sentimental type.

And, of course, his hands had been tied—more by Chou Fo-hai than by the Japanese military police. For some time Chou had been directing his own secret-service operation, and saw Government Intelligence—Mr. Yee’s department—as an irrelevance. Consequently, he kept an oppressively close eye on them, always on the lookout for evidence of incompetence. Mr. Yee could imagine all too easily what use Chou would have made of the discovery that the head of Domestic Intelligence had given house-room to an assassin’s plant.

Now, at least, Chou could find no grounds on
which to reproach him. If he accused him of executing potentially useful witnesses, he could confidently counter that they’d been only students; they weren’t experienced spies from whom a slow, reasoned torture could have spilled useful information. And if the executions had been delayed, word of the affair might have gotten out. They would have become patriotic heroes plotting to assassinate a national traitor; a rallying point for popular discontent.

He was not optimistic about the way the war was going, and he had no idea how it would turn out for him. But 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.

“Take us out to dinner, Mr. Yee! Take us out!” the three black capes chirruped ferociously. “He promised last time!”

“So did Ma Tai-tai,” Yee Tai-tai smilingly intervened,

“then when we didn’t see her for a few days, we forgot all about it.”

“Ever the loyal wife.” Ma Tai-tai smiled back.

“Look, is Mr. Yee going to take us to dinner or not?”

“Mr. Yee has certainly had a run of luck lately,” Ma Tai-tai pronounced, looking at him and smiling again. They understood each other perfectly. She could hardly have failed to notice the two of them disappearing, one after the other. And the girl still wasn’t back. He had looked distracted when he returned, the elation still glimmering over his face. This afternoon, she guessed, had been their first assignation.

He reminded himself to drill his wife on the official story he had made up: that Mai Tai-tai had needed to hurry back to Hong Kong to take care of urgent family business. Then, to frighten her a bit with some secret-service patter: that not long after she invited this viper into the bosom of their home, he had received intelligence that she was part of a Chungking spy ring. Just as his people had begun to make further inquiries, he had heard that the Japanese had gotten wind of it. If he hadn’t struck first, he would have gotten none of
the credit for the intelligence work already done, and the Japanese might have discovered the connection with his wife, and tried to incriminate him. Best lay it on thick, so that she didn’t listen to Ma Tai-tai’s gossip.

“Take us to dinner, Mr. Yee! Stop getting your wife to do your dirty work.”

“My wife gives her own dinners. She’s promised you tomorrow.”

“We know how busy you are, Mr. Yee. You tell us when you’re free, and we’ll be there; any day after tomorrow.”

“No, take us tonight. How about Lai-hsi?”

“The only edible thing there is the cold buffet.”

“German food is boring—nothing but cold cuts. How about somewhere Hunanese, just for a change?”

“Or there’s Shu-yü—Ma Tai-tai didn’t come with us yesterday.”

“I’d rather Chiu-ju—I haven’t been there for ages.”

“Didn’t Yang Tai-tai hold a dinner at Chiu-ju?”

“Last time we went, we didn’t have Liao Tai-tai with us. We needed someone from Hunan—we didn’t know what to order.”

“It’s too spicy for me!” “Then tell the chef to make it less spicy.” “Only cold fish won’t eat hot chili!” Amid the raucous laughter, he quietly slipped out.

AFTERWORD

Ang Lee

To me, no writer has ever used the Chinese language as
cruelly as Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), and no story of hers is as beautiful or as cruel as “Lust, Caution.” She revised the story for years and years—for decades—returning to it as a criminal might return to the scene of a crime, or as a victim might reenact a trauma, reaching for pleasure only by varying and reimagining the pain. Making our film, we didn’t really “adapt” Zhang’s work, we simply kept returning to her theater of cruelty and love until we had enough to make a movie of it.

Zhang is very specific in the traps her words set. For example, in Chinese we have the figure of the tiger who kills a person. Thereafter, the person’s ghost willingly works for the tiger, helping to lure more prey into the jungle. The Chinese phrase for this is
wei hu dzuo chung.
It’s a common phrase and was often used to refer to the Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese occupiers during the war. In the story Zhang has Yee allude to this phrase to describe the relationship between men and women. Alive, Chia-chih was his woman; dead, she is his ghost, his
chung.
But perhaps she already was one when they first met, and now, from beyond her grave, she is luring him closer to the tiger. . . .

Interestingly, the word for
tiger’s ghost
sounds exactly like the word for
prostitute
. So in the movie, in the Japanese tavern scene, Yee refers to himself with this word. It could refer to his relationship to the Japanese—he is both their whore and their
chung.
But it also means he knows he is already a dead man.

We, the readers of Zhang Ailing, are we her
chung
? Often the transition from one life into the next is made unexpectedly, as an experience of the imagination. Zhang describes the feeling Chia-chih had after performing on stage as a young woman, the rush she felt afterward, that she could barely calm down even after a late-night meal with her friends from the theater and a ride on the upper deck of a tram. When I read that, my mind raced back to my own first experience on the stage, back in 1973 at the Academy of Art in Taipei: the same rush of energy at the end of the play, the same late-night camaraderie, the same wandering. I realized how that experience was central to Zhang’s work, and how it could be transformed into film. She understood playacting and mimicry as something by nature cruel and brutal: animals, like her characters, use camouflage to evade their enemies and lure their prey. But mimicry and performance are also ways we open ourselves as human beings to greater experience, indefinable connections to others, higher meanings, art, and the truth.

WHY DID SHE DO IT?

James Schamus

Why did she do it?

The question is itself an admission of the impossibility of ever really answering it.

And yet we ask.

Another, more specific, way of asking:

What act, exactly, does Wang Chia-chih perform at that fateful moment in the jeweler’s shop when she decides whether or not to go through with the murder of her lover?

And here, two words—
act
and
perform
—indicate the troubling question Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) asks us: for at the crucial moment when we
choose
, when we
decide
, when we
exercise our free will
, are we not also
performing
?

One could say that “Lust, Caution” depicts a heroine who “becomes herself” only when she takes on the identity of another, for only behind the mask of the character Mai Tai-tai can Chia-chih truly desire, and thus truly live—playacting allows her to discover her one real love. But this is too reductive. For the performer always, by definition, performs
for
someone. And that audience, no matter how entranced, is always complicit: it knows deep down that the performance isn’t real, but it also knows the cathartic truth the performer strives for is attainable only when that truth is, indeed,
performed
. Yee doesn’t simply desire Mai Tai-tai while suspecting she is not who she says she is; it is precisely
because
he suspects her that he desires her. In this sense his desire is the same as hers: he wants to
know
her. And so lust and caution are, in Zhang’s work, functions of each other, not because we desire what is dangerous, but because our love is, no matter how earnest, an
act
, and therefore always an object of suspicion.

If Chia-chih’s act at the end of the story is indeed an expression of love, it paradoxically destroys the very theatrical contract that made the performance of that love possible—in killing off her fictional character, she effectively kills herself. Her act is thus a negation of the very idea that it could be acknowledged, understood, explained, or reciprocated by its audience.
¹

I think one of the things that drew Ang Lee, and the rest of us with him, toward Zhang Ailing’s work was a feeling that her writing itself is just this kind of “act”—a profound cry of protest against the warring structures of domination that so cata-clysmically shaped midcentury China and made her life a long series of displacements. “Lust, Caution” is of course not a work of autobiography, but in it we see the shape of Zhang’s life, and its terrible disorientations, ghosted behind almost every line.

Like her heroine, Wang Chia-chih, Zhang was a student in Hong Kong during the Pacific War’s early years; the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in 1941 cut short her English studies at the University of Hong Kong, precipitating her return to her aunt and mother’s home in Shanghai—a home to which she had fled a few years earlier after a stay with her opium-addicted, abusive father. In Shanghai she married her first husband, a philanderer who served in the collaborationist government; when the Japanese were defeated, he fled and took up with another woman. Like Chia-chih, Zhang had earlier tried to get to London, but the war eclipsed those plans, too. In 1952, she moved to Hong Kong, and from there to the United States, where she died, in 1995, at the age of seventy-five, in Los Angeles. A precocious and accomplished literary genius, she wrote masterpieces in her early twenties. She continued to write, both in Chinese and English, into the 1970s, and though her works were banned for a long time in Mainland China, she has remained a revered and widely read author throughout the Chinese-speaking world.

Zhang did not just transmute her private sagas into art; she took the dominant cultural and po litical myths of her day and followed her char acters to their bitterest ends as they fulfilled those myths. In this, she made use in particular of another “Shanghai Xiaoxie” (Shanghai Miss) of the 1920s and ’30s, a woman who was per haps the greatest star the Chinese cinema has ever produced: Ruan Lingyu. Ruan, even in her day, was something of a mythic figure, revered with an uncommon fervor—it is said, for ex ample, that at her funeral in 1935 the proces sion was more than two miles long. Facing a public scandal caused by a ne’er-do-well for mer lover, she killed herself at the age of twenty-five. Her death was a national trauma, made all the more disturbing by the fact that in her last film, the wildly popular
New Woman
(1935, directed by Cai Chu-sheng), she portrayed a character who also met her death at her own hand—a character based on a real actress, Ai Xia, who had herself committed suicide. Wang
²
Chia-chih, like Ruan Lingyu, is a woman caught up in a game of cinematic and literary mirrors, a game that has now ensnared Ang Lee as he reflects his own cinematic mirror onto Zhang Ailing’s remarkable work.

¹
I get much of this sense of the “act” from the philosopher Slavoj Ž ižek. See his
Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
(New York: Routledge, 2001): “The act differs from an active intervention (action) in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent): the act is not simply something that I ‘accomplish’—after an act, I’m literally ‘not the same as before’ . . . in it, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not) . . .” (p. 44). For ž ižek, the act is a supreme form of feminine rejection: “we shouldn’t forget that the paradigmatic case of such an act is feminine: Antigone’s ‘No!’ to Creon, to state power; her act is literally suicidal, she excludes herself from the community, whereby she offers nothing new, no positive program—she just insists on her unconditional demand” (p. 46). I discuss this idea further in
Gertrud: The Moving Word
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming 2008).