Healing·Literature (middle)

The second book to introduce is "Fang Siqi's Paradise of First Love" by Lin Yihan.

"Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise" was published in 2017. Immediately caused a stir, the theme of the novel itself has become a topic - the teacher seduces the underage students. After the book was published, the author Lam Yihan received many media interviews. Just when the novel attracted more and more topics, the author suddenly stopped all interviews and book promotion activities. More than two months after the book was published, the author was found hanging himself in his home. Subsequent developments led to a rush to buy the book, which not only sold out, but also pirated copies. The novel also became a bestseller that year.

However, it is really embarrassing to become a bestseller under such circumstances.

I didn't choose to read it at the time, and I didn't even read the interview of the author, Lam Yik Han. Maybe the subject matter is too heavy to have the courage to face it, and even more unwilling to read it like a novelist or watching gossip news, this is disrespect to the author. It was not until I read Teacher Chen Xue's "The Devil's Daughter" that I dared to pick it up.

The novel tells the time of the protagonist Fang Siqi in middle school. At that time, she and her good friend Liu Yiting, who were like twin sisters, met Xu Yiwen who married into the Qian family. The three of them love literature and have become the best friends of literature. Soon, Chinese language supplementary teacher Li Guohua and his wife moved into the apartment. Because of this, Siqi and Yiting began to accept Guohua's Chinese guidance. At this time, Fang Siqi was sexually assaulted by Li Guohua. The story tells the story of Fang Siqi's five-year relationship with her teacher, Li Guohua, and on the other hand, Xu Yiwen was beaten by her husband Qian Yiwei after drinking.

There are no other words to describe this book except heavy. The theme itself is, the other is that Siqi constantly deceives herself/forces herself to fall in love with her teacher, in order to escape the unspoken thing of sexual assault. Whenever Li Guohua asked for something, she had to cooperate and convince herself that she was willing. She couldn't explain it to anyone, even to Yiwen, who was like her sister, because of her character, and this was being seen through by Li Guohua:

It was Siqi's self-esteem that finally made Li Guohua decide to take this step. Such a delicate child would not say anything because it was so dirty. Self-esteem is often a needle that hurts others, but here, self-esteem will sew up her mouth. (page 52)

Although Siqi hypnotized her relationship with Li Guohua, such as Zhang Ailing and Hu Lancheng; Xu Guangping and Lu Xun. But Li Guohua never saw it this way:

For more than 20 years, Li Guohua discovered that there are beautiful girls in the world who support him and love him. He found that society's sense of taboo on sex was too convenient. When a girl was raped, the whole world felt that it was her own fault, even she felt that it was her own fault. Guilt drives her back to him again... (pp. 85, 86)

The author has very good literary attainments, and can use artistic conception to describe Siqi's state of mind in the face of sexual assault:

When I found myself being screwed, I could clearly refute that it was Feiyan's sister Zhao Hede. I felt that I had a minimum dignity supported... The vitality of literature is excavated in a most cruel and inhumane situation. Humor is not publicized to others, but only quietly and silently happy. Literature says that the same love poem can be recited to a fifty-year-old wife or fifteen-year-old lover. The first poem I could memorize when I was a child was Cao Cao's short song line. It happened that the teacher often sang it to me, and I always translated it in my heart. "The moon star is rare, and the magpies fly south. Around the tree three times, what branches can you rely on?" For the first time, I noticed that the eyes were like birds. Circle after circle, the crystal lamp is round, just like walking on the earth, it is no different from walking an infinitely large manuscript paper, like a round table for adults to gather, the teacher is on my left and also On my right, my eyes circled around the crystal lamp, counting and counting, not knowing where it started and how to stop. (pages 197, 198)

This kind of episode has been many times, and every time it makes me feel heartache, shake my wrists; hate and sympathize. If the heart is not strong, it is really impossible to read.

Yiwen's husband Qian Yiwei's evil is to let himself go. He knew about the problem of alcoholism, and his wife Yiwen had already expressed her horror, even his friends saw it and persuaded him well. However, he ignored it until the last straw that overwhelmed the camel, did he know that the situation could not be saved. The author puts Yiwen in the novel, perhaps as a space between Siqi and Li Guohua. I feel that if I only describe Siqi's situation, the novel will become monolithic; two lines, the attitudes and moods of the two women facing "evil", and the contrast between their endings.

The women in the works are not only victims, but also persecutors. For example, Qian Yiwei's mother did not know that her son had such a problem, because before Yiwen married into the Qian family, it was known that several women were beaten away by her son. However, she wasn't going to deal with it. As for Li Guohua's wife, it's not that she didn't know about Li Guohua's evil deeds, but she just refrained from revealing it. They are both women, but they are not on the same front to fight against such evil deeds, but to blame the victims, which makes people sympathize with Siqi and Yiwen.

At the end of the novel, Yi Wen said these words to Yi Ting, which must be the author's purpose for writing the book, and also the expectation of readers:

Patience is not a virtue, taking patience as a virtue is how this hypocritical world maintains its twisted order, anger is a virtue. Yiting, you can write an angry book, think about how lucky people are who can read your book, they can see the back of the world without touching. (page 221)

(to be continued)

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"Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise"
https://www.books.com.tw/products/0010743217