Private version

Author: Jie Chen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-01
Features: This collection of essays by the female writer Jie Chen is filled with feminist consciousness and sentiment, divided into five sections: "Jealousy and Beauty," "Others' Love," "Fine Red," "Talented Women Are Not Young," and "Declining Brilliance." With a light, graceful, witty, and concise style, the author narrates stories about youth and love, fashion and trends, obsession and transcendence, and aestheticism and nihilism. The writing fully reflects a woman's sensitivity, delicacy, tenderness, and beauty, while also revealing the anxieties, desires, fragility, and decay of a modern intellectual woman. As a discordant note in the main melody, it has nothing to do with brightness, vastness, ugliness, or darkness—it is merely a woman's own singing, listening intently to her inner voice. The language throughout is elegant and exquisite, the imagery splendid and radiant, with a strong style reminiscent of Eileen Chang, making it an invaluable read in women's literature. I can no longer use many of the expressions from Private Version anymore. Those richer, more entangled words about my youth, my preference for sensuality, and the aesthetic pleasure they brought. Those were beautiful memories of my writing, and also the significance of this book's reissue, for me and for readers who appreciate my words. Jie Chen is aesthetic, and reading Private Version gives the feeling that the beauty of the words themselves is the main point. She once praised the Japanese haiku poet Basho for describing midsummer flowers as "a deep color of one," and her own writing style is similar—deliberate yet effortless. Reading her essays is like watching someone dance gracefully on a cliff. In the essay "Kawagoe's Sensual World," Jie Chen writes: "Films like Kawagoe's Sensual World don't matter what they say, but how they say it. What's needed here is one-sidedness; completeness is tiresome. The pale white cherry blossoms are fading, their petals falling onto the hands of a talented, unrestrained ukiyo-e painter, onto the eyelashes of a famous Edo courtesan with a fiery reputation and an icy temperament. On stage, there is the long, rhythmic performance of Kabuki, while in the audience, there is fleeting joy and wit. Fragments of life sparkle, reflecting the brilliance of the past, yet they are chillingly cold." The beauty of the words is worth savoring again and again. Jie Chen is skilled at discovering subtle and fleeting beauty; to her, such beauty is the ultimate. Beauty connects the subtle with the infinite, the momentary with eternity, so beauty is the most pure. In fact, Jie Chen's mastery of language is her mastery of beauty, because beauty lies in the subtle and fleeting moments, and one must be attentive to it before it slips away. To be honest, Jie Chen's writing themes have limitations, but what is rare is that she seems to "dance with shackles," breaking free from these constraints and transforming her unique perceptions into beautiful butterflies that flutter away. Jie Chen often quotes Eileen Chang's words in Private Version, showing her deep admiration for her. However, the editor of Private Version claims that Jie Chen's writing "has a strong Eileen Chang style," which is a bit exaggerated. Jie Chen has her own style—why drag Eileen Chang into it?