A Startled Swan

In the late 1940s, several young people under twenty in the Jiangnan region around Suzhou and Hangzhou gathered together out of a romantic and ardent longing for art. The protagonist, Fan Guocui, elegant and free-spirited, resolves to devote his life to art and agrees with several close friends to venture to Europe. Before departing, he falls in love at first sight with Zhao Chengxi, his friend's younger sister; their brief romance is cut short by the vast ocean between them. Later Zhao Chengxi marries another man by circumstance, and Fan Guocui also encounters new emotional entanglements abroad; only that one attachment runs through both their lives to the end. The novel is centered on Paris and depicts the circumstances of Chinese art students studying in Europe in the early decades of the last century, persisting in creation amid poverty: cramped studios in attics, odd jobs taken to make a living, and an almost fanatical worship of the old masters' original works. On his pursuit of art Fan Guocui grows ever more solitary and isolated, absorbed in creation while neglecting the person who stays by him without wavering, until illness and poverty finally exhaust his life. Before dying, he leaves Zhao Chengxi a letter, confessing his regret at not having spent more time with her. The book opens as a love story and closes as a meditation on life, its gaze extending from the Yangtze River Delta, where Eastern and Western civilizations meet, to the attic studios of Paris, and then to the mysterious smile on the stone cliffs of the ancient Khmer kingdom. Writing with a painter's eye, the author portrays a group of "unsuccessful ascetics," retrieving their brief moment of brilliant flowering and, within it, the fleeting rises and falls of fate, gains and losses, ecstasy and lingering pain.