The Climax of “Lust, Caution”
At the risk of exhausting readers’ patience, here is one more post on Ang Lee’s new movie, “Lust, Caution,” which is based on the novella by Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang). Spoiler warning: If you want to view the movie without any sense of the ending, stop reading now.
The new English edition of “Lust, Caution,” just out from Anchor Books, contains a foreward by translator Julia Lovell and an afterword by Ang Lee about the heroine’s play-acting, which he clearly made into the theme of the film. But more interesting to our mind is a second afterword by producer James Schamus on the subject of love and free will:
“If Chia-chih’s act at the end of the story is indeed an expression of love, it paradoxically destroys the very theatrical contract that made the performance of that love possible — in killing off her fictional character, she effectively kills herself. Her act is thus a negation of the very idea that it could be acknowledged, understood, explained, or reciprocated by its audience.
“I think one of the things that drew Ang Lee, and the rest of us with him, toward Zhang Ailing’s work was a feeling that her writing itself is just this kind of ‘act’ — a profound cry of protest against the warring structures of domination that so cataclysmically shaped midcentury China and made her life a long series of displacements.”
That act is a tip-off to save the lover the heroine was supposed to kill.
The Siberian Fur Store on Bubbling Well Road in 1936
The incident that inspired the story was retold by Pan Ling (Lynn Pan) in “Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise” (Heinemann, 1984):
“There was the time Ding [Mocun, a collaborator colleague of Zhang Ailing's husband Hu Lancheng] was out driving with his teenage mistress [Zheng Pingru], a schoolgirl who had a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, and whose sympathies were assumed to lie on the side of the mother. In her way this under-aged paramour was quite a well known figure in the French Concession: heads always turned when she rode by on her bicycle toward her home near the French Park [now Fuxing Park]. Since the street, as every espionage agent knows, is where the risks are the greatest, Ding would not normally have made an unscheduled stop. But when they came down Bubbling Well Road [now Nanjing Road West and Yanan Road] towards the Siberian Fur Store, the girl insisted that they got down to look at some coats. Just seconds before they entered the shop Ding realized that he had walked into a trap, for at the door were some men carrying brown paper parcels which would unwrap to disclose hardware he could very well do without. Though he managed to run for it, standard procedure demanded that the girl wound up dead. His suspicions that she was a double agent working for Chongqing were confirmed when he came across one of her calling cards inscribed with a Buddhist prayer for his painless death. Too squeamish to do it himself, he ordered one of his men to take her to a graveyard and shoot her. The young girl had the same effect on her executioner as she had had on Ding Mocun, and for a moment he almost saw in his gun-sight not an enemy target but a beauty it would be a shame to snuff out. ‘Whatever you do, don’t mutilate my face’ were her last words to him. Nor did he, judging by the photograph taken of her remains (the rank immediacy of freshly executed traitors congealed into photographs, vividly suggestive of the effectiveness of terrorist techniques, was regarded as good publicity material by both sides in the secret service war).”
The Siberian Fur Store on Bubbling Well Road, by the way, was run by the Russian Jew Gregori Klebanov. It is not to be confused with the shop by the same name set up by Stephen Fong at 29 Des Voeux Road Central in Hong Kong in 1935, which is still operated by the Fong family.
The moral ambiguity of the story is only heightened by the recent assertion by Taiwanese journalist Lung Ying-tai that Ding Mocun was indeed, as he claimed before his execution in 1947, a double agent working for the KMT, as discussed in detail here.
