First Night

First Night is a novel by the Shanghai writer Tang Ying. It was first published in issue 3 of 2007 of the journal Harvest, first published in book form by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in 2007, and reissued in a new edition by Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House in 2017 in the "Tang Ying Works: Two Cities Series." The novel unfolds in reverse chronology, spanning from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century, centered on the youthful memories of the heroine Dielai: a carnival-like mass parade opens her adolescence; a quarrel with a male classmate, Haishen, at middle school leads to violence, and a hastily tasted "forbidden fruit" with her first love, Ah San, leaves an unspoken ache. Thereafter Dielai is sent to the countryside, takes the college entrance exam, breaks off an engagement, pursues graduate studies, studies abroad, falls in love, marries, and has a child; her life seems to follow a conventional path, yet her soul remains forever off-course and unsettled. Her emotional entanglements with Ah San, Haishen, and Li Cheng repeatedly bring her back, like mirrors, to the starting point of her youth. As memory flows backward, she discovers that her body and emotions time and again return to the source of love. With a delicate, sharp brush, Tang Ying depicts the repression of body and mind in an ascetic era, and also the growing pains and self-discovery of women amid changing times; the book has been called a spiritual coming-of-age history of a generation.