Jalia Smart
Jing-lu Sun
Anni Xin
Period 2
INTRODUCTION:
“I hold it true, what’er befall,
I feel it, when I sorrow most,
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all” (Alfred Tennyson)
As demonstrated in the above quote, the concept of love is significant in one’s life. It can influence one’s actions, thoughts, feelings, and other factors. But love is not simply a statement of words; it is a complex mix of feelings and people. Love can weave a complicated web with many obstacles. In the process of overcoming obstacles in love, it can be triumphant, or it can be a complete disaster. People can change and the love can also change.
If Luo were to hear the introductory quote, he would surely disagree. While that may be true, the book agrees with the quotation. In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, the aspects of love are represented by a wide variety of things. For example, there are boyish crushes, deep romance, and heartbreak. When the main character (who is unnamed) and his friend Luo first meet the Little Seamstress, they find her attractive and friendly. At first, Luo does not think the Little Seamstress is good enough for him.
On the way I asked Luo: “D’you fancy her, the Little Seamstress?”
He plodded on with bowed head, taking his time to reply.
“Have you fallen in love with her?” I persisted.
“She’s not civilized, at least not enough for me!” (Sijie 127)
Both of them develop secretive crushes for the Little Seamstress, but as time goes on, Luo is the only one who expresses his feelings toward her. As Luo develops a serious relationship with her, the main character remains a secret admirer and a somewhat awkward bystander. Later, when he and Luo discover a secret stash of banned Western Literature, Luo decides to make the Little Seamstress more sophisticated by exposing her to the books and the Western culture. However, what the Little Seamstress learns changes everything. “She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price. “ (184). She leaves Luo, the main character, and her father, and her home to become a city girl. Luo had transformed her into someone who she was not originally meant to be, thus ruining her love for him.
There are certain things that remain after they’re lost and certain things that simply fades through time. Such as love resulted for arranged marriages and love resulted from free marriages. The storyline of The Story of the Stone otherwise known as The Red Chamber Dream suggests that the ideas of freedom of choice in marriage and arranged marriages are in absolute confronting positions. Best examples to demonstrate this outlook on love and marriage are affections between Bao-yu and Dai-yu in contrast with the affections between Bao-yu and Bao-chai, whom are direct cousins. Love rarely develop at first sight, but takes a long time to shape, therefore arranged marriages by parents cannot and will not result in satisfying love life. The marriage of Bao-yu and Bao-chai is one example, when pure affection gets mixed up with the desire of power and wealth; it is likely that the couple will encounter emotional breakdowns which will pull the marriage apart eventually. In this case, Bao-yu renounced the world and adapted Buddhism not long after being married to Bao-chai. However, even falling in love freely takes time. When Bao-yu and Dai-yu first encountered, they were no older than thirteen. Although Bao-yu said “I’ve seen this cousin before…Well, perhaps not, but her face seems so familiar and I have the impression of meeting her again after a long separation.” it was not love. It was a so-called feeling of “predestiny” that Chinese believed in, a god-sent relationship, fallen right out of the sky. Their firm, solid love developed long after they’ve lived under the same roof for years. Bao-yu believed in predestinations made by a superior being, rather than arrangements by their parents. As he and Dai-yu tries to fight this traditional force of arranged marriage, this issue becomes a continuous struggle for characters in story to the stone and Cao Xue-qin himself, and even for young people today living in china. Old traditional people like to say, “An arm cannot twist a leg.” This is exactly what happened with Bao-yu and Dai-yu. Despite their efforts, they did not end up marrying each other. But the tragedy of Bao-yu and Dai-yu cried out to us after nearly there centuries, so we can feel the heat, the strength and depth of their forbidden love and pain. Similar to the belief in The old man and the sea, it tells us that one can be destroyed but never defeated. And in this case, love stays eternal.
However love may not always stay eternal i.e. divorces. But for the love to stay eternal sometimes you have to take it a step at a time like Mikage and Yuichi did. They first began with a friendship they knew would last forever and then grew it into a love that also would last. In the book Kitchen they shared a special one and handled it with care. But the relationship was complicated, there were so many things hindering them that sometimes they are afraid, confused and even bewildered. They only realized how much they loved each other until they did the most outrageous thing for something simple. For example driving for hours in the middle of the night to bring someone a bowl of food.
“I announced my destination. “I’d like to go to Isehara, please.” “Isehara?” screeched the driver… “A matter of love is it.” I smiled ruefully. “Something along those lines.” (93)
At this point Mikage had such passionate love for Yuichi that she is ready and willing to pay an expensive fee to bring him an “awesome” bowl of katsudon just so that they can share the same experience forever. Mikage and Yuichi were ready to spend their entire life together. You don’t really think about love until it hits you smack dead in the face as it did Mikage and Yuichi.
All these characters twisted in their own emotions, were drawn into a timeless swirl of struggles against internal conflicts and external forces. They were not fabrications of pure fiction for our entertainment, nor were they prisoners of love who got enslaved by their own emotions. The characters are part of us; they live inside us, and they are our future. We know little about their joy, their misery and pain, or how love for each of them ended up on a large, universal scale. Thus love is a blurry concept that doesn’t have a particular shape or form, or time span. But the efforts made to find love, fight love, gain love, preserve love by these couples were not in vain. In this eternal process of searching and discovering, not only can we find who we are, what are worth fighting for, but also whom love has made us become.