At first look at the book title, one might relate it to a love story. But Lin Yihan, the author of Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise in an interview after the publication in 2017, stated aloud that “If you see pain, it’s real. But if you see beauty, that’s also real (如果你看见痛苦，那是真实的；如果你看见美，那也都是真实的).”[1][2] This semi-autobiographical fiction has sparked large-scale discussions on the internet in Taiwan and mainland China about gender-based violence[3]. “Love” and “Paradise” from the title of the book are vocabularies with intensity, seemingly senseless in revealing the unbearable realities that the protagonists, the teenage girls in Taiwan, went through. Lin posits that rape, seduction, and sexual violence by the perpetrators are socially constructed. She articulates sexual violence by the detailed portrayal of the scenes to the extent that almost no one could ignore the striking bluntness. Lin pushes gender-based violence under public scrutiny by her words, calling for institutional efforts to address the invisible crimes in Taiwan.
The occurrence of the crime takes place within an educational system, wherein significant participants and elements play a role in its existence. The protagonist Fang Siqi’s middle-class family of intellectual background views meritocracy and reputation more than anything, embedded within which are their traditional ideas of viewing sex education or talking about sex as taboo. They have the financial resources to send their daughter to Li Guohua, a Mandarin teacher who coaches Chinese literature and writing. Li is the predator using rhetorics about love to seduce and rape Fang Siqi, her friends, and other adolescent girls, who share passion and interest for literature. All these incidents happened in Li Guohua’s room, schools, and hotels. Besides revealing the predator, Lin holds the family, the educational system, and the institutions accountable for the tragedy.
Examining the wave of intellectual meritocracy of Taiwanese society more closely reveals several noteworthy aspects and characteristics of the cultural and historical background. Taiwanese culture consists of influences of Confucianism, “indigenous cultures”, and the “legacy of colonialism”.[4] This distinguished combination also shapes education.[5] Against the backdrop of socioeconomic development, Taiwanese neoliberalism took on its own distinctive characteristics by late 1990s.[6] Under the “marketization of education”, middle-class families pay for private tutors and can choose “a high-performing private secondary school”.[7] The tutor, Li Guohua, depicted in the book, committed the acts of seduction and rape precisely against this prevailing backdrop.
The topics of this book, rape, sexual violence, and women’s struggle, all have been explored throughout contemporary Chinese women’s writing. As Jonathan Stalling iterates in the introduction of the book Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers: An Anthology, “a pointedly gendered exploration” in works of more than four decades has been presented in heterogeneous women’s writing in contemporary Taiwan[8]. Across the Taiwan Straits, the burgeoning feminist writing can be observed since the 1980s in mainland China.[9] Jiang asserts that Chinese history witnesses the body engaged in movements fighting for causes, or becomes a space for power plays.[10] According to her analysis, Chinese female writers’ work since the 1990s often apply what she calls, “body-writing” strategies to recreate the “authentic” “self”, which is often repressed or hidden.[11] These works reveal the interaction between physical bodies with the urban sphere. A similar observation has been made by Peter Brooks. He suggests that “modern narratives” are to “uncover the body” to reveal a truth embodied in the body.[12] I would argue that Lin’s book could be viewed as a form of body-writing in the sense that it exposes the unspeakable, the invisible, the unbearable in front of the spotlight. The disclosure is mostly achieved through revealing how female bodies are violated, or deconstructed, by sexual violence.
In iconic female writer Eileen Zhang’s book Lust, Caution, the heroine fell in love with her rapist.[13] However, Lin’s work, full of female sensitivity, contemplates classic topics throughout female writing history, changing the old narratives and even yielding a big impact so as to inspire the #Metoo movement in Chinese society.
One aspect of originality, as pointed out by Shen, is that Lin Yihan, in contrast to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, directly addresses rape itself without attempting to fit it into another discourse to reinforce masculinity or use love as a justification.[14] The second layer, I argue, lies in the profoundly aesthetic experience it offers, which arises from Lin’s literary strategies rooted in her triple identity as a female writer, a victim of such violence, and even as an activist. The aesthetic pleasure evokes empathy as a foundation for activism. This is supported by a neuroscientific study conducted in 2006, which suggests that aesthetic judgments of beauty activate a brain network associated with evaluative judgments and share neural substrates with social and moral judgments.[15] Lin consciously employs aesthetic tools, as evidenced by her interview.