K, p.1
K, page 1
Hong Ying
K: THE ART OF LOVE
Translated by Nicky Harman and Henry Zhao
Contents
Author’s Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
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K: THE ART OF LOVE
Hong Ying was born into a sailor’s family in Chongqing on the Yangtze River in Southwest China. An author and poet, she began her career as a full-time writer in the early 1980s having studied creative writing at Lu Xun Creative Writing Academy and Fudan University.
She is best known in the English-speaking world for her novels: K: The Art of Love (which won the Prix de Rome in 2005), The Concubine of Shanghai, Peacock Cries and Summer of Betrayal. Her autobiography, Daughter of the River, has been translated into twenty-nine languages and many of her works have been turned into television series and films. Her latest memoir, Good Children of the Flowers, a sequel to Daughter of the River, won Asia Weekly’s Top Ten Books of the Year Award in 2009. She lives in Beijing with her husband and daughter.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Summer of Betrayal
Daughter of the River
Peacock Cries
The Concubine of Shanghai
Author’s Foreword
As far as the creation of a novel goes, I believe there is only one basic criterion: a novel should be ‘a good story well told’. This should be in the forefront of one’s mind before and during the writing. After the book is written it is, of course, too late to do anything except re-read and review one’s feelings about it.
Since K is based on a true story I will first explain how it came about. In China in the 1980s I was involved in both officially recognized and underground literary circles. I was reading voraciously and one of the first writers I came across was the chief protagonist of the book – that is, K herself. I very much admired her highly evocative, romantic writings – to me she was the boldest of the New Moon Society’s women authors.
In the course of time, tantalizingly sketchy rumours about K’s life also came to my ears. Although it was hard to be certain how true they were, they linked her to a certain young English poet by the name of Julian Bell, son of Vanessa Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf. I came across people loosely connected with K, one of whom was a student of Julian’s at Wuhan University. He it was who went with Julian to Sichuan to look for the Red Army. This man later became a well-known writer and translator and, in the 1980s, published lengthy memoirs, which included a few words about his old teacher, Julian Bell.
I saw pictures of K, which did indeed show her to be exceptionally beautiful, and I came across contemporary biographies which refer to her as the Beauty of Luojia Hill. I have also seen photographs of her wearing glasses, and these appear to transform her magically into a typical ‘woman writer’.
This, of course, did not make a story, but it did make a deep impression on me.
In 1994, Bloomsbury brought out a thick volume of the collected letters of Vanessa Bell. These included many letters to her son Julian, in which K was frequently mentioned, and the extent of the loving intimacy between mother and son that these letters reveal was very moving. Her country home, Charleston, attracts a constant stream of Bloomsbury scholars from all over the world. Inside the house, on the walls decorated with Bell’s paintings, it is the portraits of Julian that dominate. Walking from room to room on a visit to the house, I was intrigued to notice a number of Chinese works of art, which might well have been presents from Julian to his mother: two bronze antiques, for example, and a statue of the Bodhisattva Guan Yin.
I had decided to dig a little deeper, to try and flesh out the characters I was beginning to know. In the London University library I found Julian Bell’s collected letters and poems, and also came across a photograph taken of him in Spain. In this last image of him, he is standing in a group of people, leaning against the ambulance, wearing a battle helmet and long boots. There is something ghost-like about his appearance. Just as Woolf noted in her diary, this cocky young nephew of hers had come back from China a very different man. ‘Julian [has] grown a man - I mean vigorous, controlled, as I guess embittered, something to me tragic in the sadness now, his mouth and face much tenser; as if he had been thinking in solitude… I felt him changed.’
Well, we know why that was.
Since no one else had drawn the two halves of this story together, I could no longer resist the challenge of being the person to write K. That was in the summer of 1998.
Of course, my researches were by no means exhaustive - I was, after all, aiming to write a novel not a biography. It was my prerogative as a novelist to use my imagination in developing the story from its historical basis, and my tale does not claim to be a factual account of the lives of the two lovers.
With the encouragement of the editor of the Chinese journal Literary Issues, I have re-read K bearing in mind some questions raised by both friends and critics.
The first of these is: ‘Was China really that poor?’ I am always being asked this question, and most often by people who have read my previous book Daughter of the River. What readers of K want to know is whether life in China was really that hedonistic. These two questions cancel each other out. This country is so big and so complex that even in the twentieth century there were many different Chinas. Of course, Chinese people enjoyed life, especially in the first half of the thirties, a time when prospects for modernizing the country seemed hopeful. An American critic writing in the Washington Post once took me to task with the question: ‘Why are books about China always so miserable?’ I hope that K will persuade him otherwise.
The next question is usually this: are Oriental women really so irresistibly seductive? Are Western men so selfish and arrogant? Questions like this imply a degree of stereotyping, of precisely the kind that was Julian’s downfall: he believed that Oriental women were all docile sweetness, while Western men were brave and strong. It was only much later that he discovered that each and every one of us is an individual made up of a mass of contradictions. K was a modern intellectual, at the same time as being a mysterious Oriental woman, and she was also an expert in the Daoist Art of Love. What label, therefore, should we put on her? Is she stereotypical? Are all Chinese women so passionate, so sexual? My only answer to that is to say, once again, that K does not represent a typical Chinese, or indeed Oriental, woman, and anyone trying to use the novel as a guide to Eastern romance is seriously deluded. If there is any message that emerges from this book, it is that stereotypes are not only foolish but can actually prove a snare for those who propagate them.
The third and perhaps most asked question remains: ‘Is this novel too erotic?’ I don’t think that fiction can be more erotic than what we experience in our own lives. Just try to write down the sensation of your finger being burned by a match, and words quickly fail you. If the reader finds K erotic then my writing has achieved its intended effect. What I am actually trying to express in this novel is the idea that sex and love are inseparable. Julian considered himself an experienced lover and believed he could have sex without love. He applied this approach to his relationship with K, only to realize - too late, alas - that he had fallen deeply and irretrievably in love with her. A love so erotically charged is a once-in-a-lifetime experience – one for which, in the novel, he expresses gratitude as he lies dying.
So, to those readers who see the erotic in K, I congratulate you on your luck: if, when you read it, my novel arouses passionate feelings in you, then how much more will you cherish your real lover? And you will have K to thank for that.
Hong Ying
Chapter One
On July 6th, 1937 the Republican Army launched the battle of Brunete in an attempt to lift the siege of Madrid. Several International Brigades threw themselves into the assault and suffered heavy casualties: more than a hundred German planes provided air support for the enemy. As the battle extended into mid-July even the wounded became a target: the Fascist pilots repeatedly struck at ambulances despite the huge red cross painted on top of them.
He had managed to escape the bombardment several times.
On the morning of the 18th he drove a ramshackle ambulance – a truck that had just been repaired – to the front again. On his way he heard one of the Messerschmidts screaming overhead. The road was too narrow to zigzag, and the fields on either side were level scrub with no cover.
He listened carefully to the howling of the plane. As it screamed towards him he stamped on the accelerator, sending the truck lurching over the stony ground. At the moment the Messerschmidt tore out of its dive he slammed on the brakes and cowered under the dashboard, protecting himself from what was surely coming.
The full force of the bomb blast caught the ambulance and nearly overturned it. There was the groan of bolts tearing out of metal as the bonnet of the truck split apart. A tinny ping, then the gurgle of oil. The shriek of steam escaping from the water tank.
The Messerschmidt whined away from them, and he crept cautiously into the open. Broken glass fell from his hair and clothes as he brushed himself down, swearing ferociously. Inside the ambulance the wounded were screaming with pain.
He looked up at the sky. If he had want ed he could have been in Madrid today, at a conference of World Writers Against Fascism; they had invited him to speak as a ‘poet in combat’. He had rejected the idea immediately: ambulance drivers were in short supply; and what more powerful poetry could there be than action amidst the shelling?
The truck would have to be abandoned – it was too far gone. When another ambulance came along the road he flagged it down and helped transfer the wounded he had been carrying.
As soon as he reached the hospital he found another vehicle and made his way back to the front line.
This time his luck ran out. On the same narrow road that he had travelled earlier in the day another bomb tumbled out of the sky directly above him. The driver’s cabin peeled open then erupted, flipping him out through a wall of fire onto the grass.
When he was carried on a stretcher into the hospital of the British medical team, he was covered in blood and dust from head to foot. The doctor who hurriedly examined him found a large piece of shrapnel lodged deep in his chest. An operation to extract it could only add to his pain and hasten his death. There were so many wounded. The doctor turned away to others whom he could help.
The nurse assigned to the hopeless cases approached his stretcher. In an attempt to ease his last moments she dipped a fragment of gauze into a bowl beside her and wiped his cheeks and forehead. His face, protected by his helmet, bore not a single scratch. His skin was pale as alabaster. He lay as if in an exhausted sleep.
She was about to leave when she saw his lips move – he was trying to say something. His eyelids fluttered in a vain attempt to open. She bent down to listen. Amid the surrounding din she had to lower her head until her ear was brushing his lips, but his words were clear.
‘All my life I wanted two things – to have a beautiful mistress and to see action. I’ve done both. I’m content.’
The nurse was astonished. She straightened up, gauze and bowl still cradled in one hand, and looked down at the patient. His gaping wound still oozed blood, which dripped onto the floor, yet he did not seem to be in pain. Having spoken, he lay apparently at peace. It was unusual for a dying man to speak with such self-satisfied composure, but this was a war and anything was possible in war.
He was murmuring something now in a language that might have been Latin – it was impossible to tell. After a while even those words trailed off as he sank into a coma.
That night he was buried in Fuen Carral, along with the others who had died that day.
The director of the hospital stripped off his blood-bespattered gloves, washed his face and sat down to sign death certificates. It was the last task he performed every day, and his hand hurried across the sheets. He could hardly keep his eyes open. He signed the last one and was tidying the stack of papers when suddenly he became aware that one of the names he had seen was familiar. He picked through the papers until he found what he was looking for:
JULIAN BELL.
Next of kin: Mrs Vanessa Bell, Mother.
Address: 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London.
The doctor smoothed out the certificate on his table and rubbed his eyes. He called to the nurse to bring him the dead driver’s belongings. He pulled everything out of the bag: the usual stuff. There was something else as well. A notebook. The doctor opened it. The pages were covered with lines – they could have been poems – in a script that meant nothing to him. But there were a few pages of a letter, carefully folded and tucked inside without an envelope. The handwriting was immaculate:
This letter is to be given to my mother Vanessa Bell in the case of my catching a fatal disease or being killed in an accident, or if there is news or a well-authenticated rumour that I am involved in revolutionary activities.
Good. The man had remembered to leave a will. It made things so much simpler for all concerned. He glanced at the rest of the page. There was a lot of it and no time to read more – he was too tired, and anyway it wasn’t his business. He took in only the place and time of writing:
On board Fushimi Maru arriving in Shanghai
September 26th, 1935
Two years ago? And in China? What kind of will was this? Snapping the book shut he let it fall onto the table. It landed softly on a yellow handkerchief of shimmering silk, wonderfully smooth in the half-light, with a delicate pattern of bamboo leaves. There was a letter ‘K’ in one corner, apparently hand-embroidered, in a darker yellow thread.
The doctor sighed. Every one of a dead man’s belongings told a different story and, once their owner was dead and buried, each left the same bitter aftertaste.
He shoved everything back into the satchel, stacked the death certificates in a pile once again and placed them in the centre of his desk. His secretary would deal with them in the morning. He stood up, suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue, and moved over to his bed. Just then he remembered that he had seen the dead man.
It was a couple of years earlier. He had been to some sort of public debate in London – he had forgotten exactly what, something to do with stopping the spread of Fascism. Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, the famous sisters, had been there, and a young man sitting between them: tall, ginger-haired, handsome, with an exuberant laugh. He was apparently mocking Professor Harold Laski, who had been defending Labour’s European policy on the platform. The young man cracked a joke, and the two sisters laughed and leaned towards him protectively.
‘That’s Julian Bell,’ a friend of the doctor’s whispered. ‘You know. King’s College, Cambridge, making a name for himself as a younger-generation Bloomsbury poet.’ There was another eruption from the little group. ‘What arrogance!’ hissed his friend. To the doctor, on the other hand, the young man had seemed rather like an overgrown schoolboy, the pet of his mother and aunt, and he felt a sneaking envy for him.
Chapter Two
The only way to cross the Yangtze from Hankou to Wuchang on the south bank was by ferry.
Julian swayed down the flimsy gangplank, and as soon as his foot touched the ground a rickshaw pulled up in front of him, blocking his way. There was a long burst of Chinese mingled with scraps of English, but only two words made any sense: ‘Please, sir.’ Julian stared. The boy was young, with a pleasant, open face. But the rickshaw squealed accusingly as he climbed aboard. Its bending boards were not designed for him.
Then the effort of pulling began – the boy’s skinny body was so tubercular-looking Julian immediately wanted to jump back down into the street again. How could he let himself be pulled along by this sickly child? He felt like a cartoon imperialist! But then he heard the disappointed shouts of other coolies – and his own young man yelling cheerfully back. There was no choice: he could not turn this boy down. He settled into his seat.
The huge urban sprawl of Wuhan was divided into three cities, Hankou, Hanyang and Wuchang, which were situated at the point where the Han River flowed into the Yangtze. Yet Julian had never heard of this colossal city before he accepted the job that had brought him here.
The boy quickened his pace, working his way towards the university. Shops appeared on either side of them now, windowless, with simple counters almost close enough to touch. In one pig’s legs and strips of dried meat hung – and behind them gaudily decorated gods glowed jewel-like in the darkness. A pot-bellied male Buddha with a huge grin; a goddess with an elaborately coiled hairdo. The streets teemed with people, some in traditional Chinese gowns, some in Western dress, others in a combination of the two. True, there were beggars, but he felt he had seen more poverty in London’s East End.
Julian thought with a certain sense of shame that he had already ceased to be aware of the efforts of his young rickshaw puller. They were accelerating again now, catching up with a Western-style brass band, with a loud drum, playing a tune he didn’t recognize. Then he saw young men carrying a sedan covered in red brocade. A Chinese phoenix wobbled on top, outlined with coloured bulbs and, strangely, large mirrors, which swung on three sides, reflecting the crowd on the street.
