Love isn't takeout.

Author: Lian Jian
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-07-01
Features: This is a short story collection divided into four parts based on literary style. In these four parts, love takes on different faces—cold, obsessive, painful, and ultimately, it is reduced to love being a state of mind. In these love stories with twists and turns, one thing remains true: love. It is love that makes these urban dwellers lose their composure and lose themselves in a sudden moment. They turn this timeless emotion of love into stories, making you, holding your breath and sweating slightly, read on in the afternoon of the city, until you reach yourself, your face pale. Throughout the book, Lian Jian's writing style and storylines are like a kaleidoscope spinning in the sunlight, turning and turning, leading you to feel unable to let go, unable to find peace. You can only follow her words, watching her, with a smile, disdain, or bursts of laughter, manipulate love between her fingers. This is not a purely romantic love story filled with flowers and snow. The humility and transparency of human nature weave through each story. Sometimes, a seemingly trivial metaphor makes the reader lose themselves. Before you can gather your thoughts, the story ends abruptly, leaving you heartbroken and tearful. No one can control love; Lian Jian can only use stories to control your emotions. For example, she uses "Old Love" to explain that the unwillingness to give up on a past love is actually a lie told by memory; "Did You Hear the Footsteps on the Rooftop?" tells you that fear is not of ghosts but of the guilt of wandering that torments one's conscience; "Love Taste" says that failed love often starts with self-suggesting wrong signals; "Inevitable Fate" reveals that the perpetrator of life's tragedies is always oneself; "Happily Selfish" depicts the helplessness of being selfish; and "Falling in Love with You Wasn't Intentional" accidentally shatters the heart and extinguishes the will to live. Lian Jian enjoys her unique way of exploring love and life in a ring-by-ring manner. Perhaps, as you read on, your heart sweats with coldness, yet you cannot deny that a seemingly casual line in the text is a real parameter of life, standing coldly and quietly in her words, forcing you to compromise step by step and exit all the lofty designs you had. Human nature is often hypocritical because of selfishness. Everyone expects to be selfish while others remain noble, yet there is no nobility in this. Nobility is merely a moral demand, a hollow and strained support. A friend once asked: Lian Jian, why do I feel like nothing is fun? What do you usually like to do for fun? Lian Jian replied: I don't know what is fun, so I just play with the storylines I invent myself. Her novels are born from her playing with herself, and she loves unique plots. She is obsessed with the pleasure of dominating a life that doesn't belong to her while writing. Whether writing romantic urban novels or suspenseful murder mysteries, the plots unfold in a cold and warm interplay, and the characters, helplessly, rotate on the stage she has designed. Sometimes, when asked when she plans to stop writing, Lian Jian is lost. At what age? At forty? At fifty? Then what will she do with the years to come? Besides writing, what else can she do? Thus, she can only answer: Write on, until she grows old, because she loves the clash between words, fictional characters, and plots. It is because of this that we have such wonderful stories to read. "Love Killing" tells the story of a young and beautiful woman, Lan Yan, whose boyfriend is in Hong Kong. Her body, unwilling to be lonely, is intimately involved with the male protagonist, Xuan Ziteng, every day. Xuan Ziteng deeply loves her and replaces the vitamin pills in her bottle with sleeping pills. The dosage of "sleeping pills" increases from one to three, yet she still cannot sleep. But Xuan Ziteng cannot bear to lose her completely one day, and his deep love turns into a murderous thought. That night, he replaces the vitamins in the bottle with real sleeping pills. Then, pretending to go to a bar to get drunk, he waits until eleven fifteen. When Lan Yan takes the pills, he calls her, pretending to be drunk, asking her to pick him up. He tries to make Lan Yan, who has no resistance to the sleeping pills, crash her car under the influence of the drug. When he is about to call to carry out the plan, he unexpectedly learns that Lan Yan has been dumped by her boyfriend in Hong Kong, and he regrets it deeply. In the end, Lan Yan appears in front of him while driving, and he is surprised. She glares at him: When have you ever seen a woman who is heartbroken want to sleep? The story ends in a happy conclusion.