Crystal Wedding

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T his is, at once, both an ordinary and an extraordinary kind of book.

I call it an ordinary book because it is written in an entirely different style to my previous work. It doesn’t have the same richness of description; there is none of the mystery or magic of my other writing — the language is simple and unadorned, devoid of symbolism and metaphor. It is the story of an ordinary female intellectual in China, charting the events of the fifteen-year period between her wedding and her divorce. Reflected in her individual fate, we see the changes wrought in the country at large over the course of those fifteen years of Chinese history.

I call it an extraordinary book because this is the first book by a mainland Chinese author to speak so frankly about sex and Chinese women.

At the first mention of sex, people’s thoughts usually turn to erotica and pornography. If that’s the kind of book you’re expecting, however, you will be sorely disappointed. What interests me is another aspect of sex entirely — namely, the fact that for three decades of Chinese history, sex was a completely taboo topic. There was no such thing as sex education for the teenagers of my generation. As a result, when it came to sex, our behaviour tended toward one of two extremes: sexual promiscuity or sexual repression. Naturally, neither of these two extremes is especially healthy, but that’s how it was. The protagonist of this novel, Yang Tianyi, is thirty when she gets married, and her attitude towards sex is one of absolute terror. Her husband, Wang Lian, is just as clueless — to the point that, one week after her wedding, Tianyi’s hymen is found to be still intact.

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