Half of a Lifelong Romance
半生缘
“世上的相遇大多猝不及防，而分离总是蓄谋已久”。
Set in pre-war Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, the Half of a Lifelong Romance depicts the ill-fated romance between a couple of Chinese lovers in Shanghai and Nanjing. The novel is adapted from Eighteen Springs that was initially a serial in Shanghai’s newspaper, Yibao (亦报), in 1950 and 1951.
Eileen Chang rewrote the story and published it as her first full-length novel in 1969. She shortened the length of the lovers’ separation from 18 to 14 years; and the title was correspondingly renamed. Through the depiction of the struggling and misfortune of a couple of young lovers, the novel reflects the negotiations between the rise of personal independence in an urban society and the prevalent politics of family values based on reciprocity in the first half of the 20th century.
The protagonist, Gu Manzhen, a lovely and educated Shanghai girl, works in a factory as a clerical assistant and falls in love with an engineer co-worker, Shen Shijun. Shijun hails from a wealthy family in Nanjing and chooses to pursue his own career in Shanghai to avoid the control of his large family. Manzhen’s elder sister, Gu Manlu, works as a nightclub hostess to support the entire family; she is married to a wealthy and decadent playboy, Zhu Hongcai, although he is not the one whom she desires. Manlu is unable to bear children, and in order to keep her husband and marriage, she arranges for Manzhen to be locked in their mansion and raped by Hongcai in an overnight visit, when Shijun was back to Nanjing to deal with his father’s merchandising business.
Manzhen has was then imprisoned in the mansion until she delivered a son in a hospital. Shijun was back to look for Manzhen but was instead persuaded by her sister, using an excuse of social differences between the two large families. Manzhen escapes from the hospital to look for Shijun but he has already married the woman his parents arranged for him.
After 14 years apart, they encounter each other at their favorite restaurant in Shanghai; they catch up on each other’s lives but desperately realize that they can never be together again, no matter how much they still love each other. Manzhen lives with her son and works as a school teacher; she married Hongcai after her sister’s death but has since divorced. The novel also depicts the tragic fate of Manlu and the unfulfilled love of Shijun’s wife in a male-dominated society. The story has been adapted into films and TV series. The Hong Kong director, Xu Anhua 许鞍华, adapted it into a film in 1997. The film won several awards and nominations at the 17th Hong Kong Film Awards, and has been fairly well received in the west.