Green Snake

Green Snake is a collection of representative novellas by Hong Kong writer Lilian Lee, comprising three tales drawn from ancient legend and history: Green Snake, Terracotta Warrior, and Temptation of a Monk. The title novella, Green Snake, takes its material from The Legend of the White Snake but hands the narrative to the green snake, Xiaoqing: through her first-person perspective she retells the emotional entanglement among White Snake Suzhen, Xiaoqing, Xu Xian, and Fahai, rewriting the seduction and restraint between human, demon, and monk, stripping away the moralizing garb of edification to confront desire, love, and resentment head-on, and transforming an old cautionary legend into a modern fable about female desire and self-determination. At the end the story pulls time into the present, setting the legend of the collapsing Leifeng Pagoda against the upheavals of twentieth-century history. Terracotta Warrior tells of a thousand-year love across the cycles of life and death between the Qin general Meng Tianfang and Dong'er; Temptation of a Monk, set against the Xuanwu Gate Incident of the Tang dynasty, portrays the life of the great general Shi Yansheng, trapped by emotion, desire, and mortality. All three are written in gorgeous, cutting prose, with wildly imaginative conceits and bizarre, twisting plots, each hidden in the crevices between history and legend, exploring the absurdity and desolation of passion and desire. All three have been adapted into films, the best known being Tsui Hark's Green Snake starring Maggie Cheung and Joey Wong; in 2013 Tian Qinxin's stage adaptation of the same name also toured many cities.