Reading Fortress Besieged — My Petty Mind

Having revisited Fortress Besieged, I find my petty suspicions growing ever more tenacious. It increasingly seems to me that the novel is nothing less than a faithful mirror of Qian Zhongshu’s own matrimonial life. And through writing it, he erected yet another wall—a Great Wall—around himself outside the besieged city, enclosing his soul so tightly he could no longer escape. Without a doubt, this so-called “pure fabrication,” as Yang Jiang once put it, has become inextricably bound to the author himself. One might say I have judged a gentleman with the heart of a scoundrel.

But why do I harbor such base thoughts? Why does this suspicion not arise when I read Nabokov? Why did I not, upon finishing Lolita, question whether he had ever set foot on that accursed “Lolita Island”—even though Epstein had yet to purchase it at the time? I find no answer, only a growing compulsion to repeat to myself: “It’s all fiction, all invention.” Yet the more I chant this mantra, the less I believe it.

So I turned to others, hoping to find kindred spirits, to lessen the burden of my guilt. I discovered many who share this same sinful suspicion, their accusations blatant and unrepentant—such as Lan Dizhi’s symptomatic analysis of Fortress Besieged in Modern Literary Classics.

Is this nothing more than the old fable—sour grapes? I cannot say for sure, yet the answer seems to lie hidden in the question itself. For grapes beyond our reach, we imagine not only their sourness but also their sweetness. Why sweet? Precisely because they are unattainable. The more inaccessible the fruit, the sweeter it becomes. And such grapes, exalted to divinity, become sacred and untouchable. What then caused me and my like-minded companions to taste only the sourness? I believe the source is Fortress Besieged itself—an origin of all evil, the very reason the fruit turned bitter.

In my view, Qian and Yang’s love was genuine at the start. In Qian’s eyes, Yang Jiang may have borne some resemblance to Tang Xiaofu. But after their marriage, she morphed into Sun Roujia. Their affection, once pure romance, gradually transformed into something resembling love’s distant cousin. The closeness of that kinship is hard to measure, and the two may not have agreed on its nature. Yet from Qian’s perspective, it likely wasn't particularly close. Even so, their bond endured—not just out of traditional virtue, but because they both had to abide by a code of conduct called Fortress Besieged.

Perhaps most love, in the end, becomes this cousin of love. And what follows depends on the intimacy one maintains with that relative.