The Beautiful Couple

The Perfect Couple is a collection of short stories by Hong Kong author Yi Shu, published in 1984 by Cosmos Books as number 040 in the Cosmos Yi Shu Series. The volume contains a dozen or so stories, once again exploring her favourite territory of urban men and women and marital relationships. The title story, The Perfect Couple, is the best known of them: at a company cocktail party, Ma Baolin, a sales manager at a real estate firm, encounters architect Huang Zhenhua and his wife Zhang Weiwei and decides that this couple is the envy of the whole city—a perfect pair—even finding herself drawn at once to the husband's charm and the wife's distinction. Huang Zhenhua then closes in step by step with bouquets and invitations, yet in his wife's calm, all-knowing gaze she sees the transactions, forbearance and calculation beneath the glossy surface of this seemingly ideal marriage. The story does not turn the affair into a sweeping romance but closes on a chilling anti-climax, taking apart the very term "perfect couple." The other pieces mostly depict urban situations—broken marriages, old flames, bitter loves, single women and married men—short in length, brisk in pace and dense in dialogue, the language plain and sharp. Yi Shu's characters are mostly adept at calculating their own circumstances, yet they also allow themselves the occasional folly; with a cool and even slightly caustic eye, the author observes their vanity, lucidity and loneliness. The reading is light, but the aftertaste carries a chill.