Peach Blossom Calamity

Author: Hainan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: In Hai Nan's narrative, there has always been a feminist stance, along with the tension between her romantic ideals of male-female love and her Oedipal love. This love was actually a hidden emotion of Hai Nan's that she had always concealed. This novel handles this emotion with extreme thoroughness and depth. The author calls this book a "confession." What does it confess? This confession is deeply buried in history, only emerging after experiencing the entirety of history. This "sudden" confession is indefinitely delayed, almost to the point of being negligible. More accurately, it is a story of bodily oppression and retaliation—a history of female bodily oppression. Hai Nan clearly wants to find a purer and more absolute history of women, which is the body. Men possess the entire world and history, while women only have their bodies. Because women only exist in the form of their bodies, they are considered women and have meaning to men. A legendary story filled with an eerie and mysterious atmosphere. This is a story set in an ancient post town on the southwestern frontier of China in the first half of the 20th century. The female protagonist, Wu Zhen, is tricked into entering a brothel and thus begins her entanglement with various men, including bandits, merchants, and Nationalist army officers. The work portrays the growth and maturation of a woman under persecution, as well as the oppression and resistance of women in a patriarchal society. A richly legendary story, written in poetic language, it showcases an exotic atmosphere against the backdrop of distant history, with an eerie and mysterious aura lingering between the pages.