authors afterword (2/2)
In Da Mo Yao I used my own method to create Meng Xi Mo, but this person was not the male lead. The story within DMY followed Huo Qu Bing’s life to recount. Four hundred thousand words are used to describe Huo Qu Bing’s legendary life. He’s also a real life historical figure, even if he’s not as well known as 4, 13, 14, but as long as someone wasn’t napping in history cla.s.s, they would at least have heard of him. So his legend was already established.
But in YZG, because I created you, everything changed. Before there was YZG, you didn’t exist. After YZG, you became you. You are someone completely and wholly belonging to me. Whether it was BBJX or DMY, the main male character’s life came from history and I just need to add some flourishes and imagination to flesh out. The exception is you. Every single detail about you, no matter how large or small, was created by me. So how could I not like you? [I think Tong Hua loves Meng Jue so much it’s undeniable, so she poured all her depth into him, and then gave him a life that is earth shatteringly memorable.]
One Jade said – In Tong Hua’s books, it was only in YZG that she created the most three-dimensional, flesh and blood character in Meng Jue. Even though this comment was full of complaint (that other than Meng Jue everyone else was not three-dimensional and flesh and blood), this is enough for me. Right? In my three volumes of YZG, I was writing all about you. Your birth, your growth, your struggle, your transformation, everything about you was written word for word by me. So you can say that the ending I gave to you doesn’t disappoint me. You are like 4, 13, 14, and Huo Qu Bing, alive in the readers hearts. You can even say that your image is even more vivid.
In the beginning of YZG, you were just you. It was someone I thought a long time before giving you a name. When I first came up with your name, it didn’t have any deeper meaning. After I decided, I realized I can split the characters up and it would become the two characters for King and Jade. So you became the King of the Jades. Afterwards I looked through word books and in the poem “Deep Fragrance” it indicated that your name meant “end of the dream.” At that moment I was stunned, and I reread the poem to realize it was describing you! So I always sigh about how life can be coincidental at times and we can’t use logic to explain it away. Otherwise, how could I explain your name? How do I explain how the poem “Deep Fragrance” was alluding to the meaning of your name? Such coincidence? So perfect to this degree?
In YZG volume 1, my feelings for you were very light. You were just a guy named Meng Jue. I remember writing DMY and after a few chapters I laughed and realized that I had already fallen in love with a fictional character named Meng Jiu, and that I will like him more and more. I didn’t feel that way about you. Until the end of volume 1, I didn’t feel like my feelings for you were growing any deeper. But I gave the draft to two men to read. After they read it, they told me not to waste this “King of the Clouds”, telling me I didn’t dig deeper in your character. They said you and Liu Xun (Liu Bing Yi) were the only two characters in this novel worth digging deeper into. I thought about it, so when I was publis.h.i.+ng the chapters I continued to add more scenes with you. When YZG volume 1 was finished, I knew that you had walked into my heart. That was when I fully accepted you as the main male lead of this novel. This novel became how your emotional transformation and your life experience pushed the entire story forward.
The proud you:
You appear so gentle on the surface, but actually you are very extreme. You are so proud, so proud. I always though that Xiao Huo was the most arrogant and proud male I’ve written, but it turned out not to be true. Xiao Huo’s arrogance comes from being born into a royal family, with the royalty seeped into his bones. He grew up in such a bright environment. But your pride comes from refusing to submit to the cruel reality of life. It’s what you use to protect yourself, it’s a s.h.i.+eld born of darkness.
From YZG volume 1 I was already thinking whether you would ever let Liu Xun (Liu Bing Yi) know that he actually owes you one huge grat.i.tude. You are so smart so how could you not know it was of value to you. Until I reached volume 3 and I knew you would never tell him. A grat.i.tude that stemmed from the exchange of your younger brother’s life is not something you would ever collect on. So even if Zhang He kept trying to hint at you, you would never admit it who you really are. You want to wipe that all away, even if you know that with one nod of your head, Zhang He would sacrifice his life to protect you. Even if you know that next to Zhang He is someone holding great military power that can be of use.
So are you really intelligent? Or really foolish? If it was Liu Xun, he would quickly admit it. But you are not him. You see yourself as someone who can use anything, use anyone, to your advantage. You see yourself as an accomplished politician like Liu Xun and Huo Guang. But you forgot that a true politician has no pride, has no arrogance. As long as you retain your arrogance then you will never be like them. In volume 2, you clearly sat beside Yun Ge for an entire afternoon, but when she woke up, you said that you had just arrived. You will use the bargain of Yun Ge marrying you before you will treat Liu Fu Ling, but you waited for so long before walking into the nursery. From dusk until it was completely dark out, in your heart you were hoping that Yun Ge would reject your offer. You wanted that nursery to be empty and she had already left. If Yun Ge rejected your offer, you might have happily gone to treat Liu Fu Ling.
But she actually accepted! You saw her figure under the vines and she agreed to marry you. What must you have felt? A world’s worth of rage and pain, right? Do you know that every time you pushed Yun Ge, you were just hurting yourself. You could have been like your adopted father and went to save your love rival. Then Yun Ge would have been grateful to you and felt guilty to you. Her respect for you might have even re-ignited the flame that once once burned for you. The she and you would not have been just a series of missed opportunities. If she rejected your offer, then you would have saved a life without any bargain. If you saved a life, then she would have had an even harder time letting you go. But you didn’t know that, and she didn’t know that! The two of you only continued to walk further and further apart in volume 2. And your importance in Yun Ge’s heart lessened in line with how Liu Fu Ling’s importance increased.
You are still you, and not your adoptive father Meng Jiu. You cannot be selfless, you only know that there is “yourself” in this entire world. If you don’t fight for what you want, no one would fight for what you want for you. I know a lot of people disliked you being this way, but I don’t believe your methods were wrong. In fact, I have a sorrowful appreciation and respect for you. Liu Fu Ling’s illness pushed you and Yun Ge further apart. Until the end, you must have realized that you will never be the only one in Yun Ge’s heart. You cannot prevent it, and you cannot control Liu Fu Ling planting his seed in Yun Ge’s heart and having that seed bloom into a flower. So you can only step back and hope that for the rest of her life you might have another chance with her.
I know that you told Liu Fu Ling about Yue Sheng in order to lower his suspicion of you. But until the very end, you never told him that you were the other owner of that green embroidered shoe. You never told him that he was not the only person in that desert who remembered the figure of that girl in green. Yes, even if it was just me, who had only half of your pride, I would not have told my love rival this story either. You hadn’t even told Yun Ge, and what was Liu Fu Ling to you anyways? No one important. To tell him about your story with Yun Ge? Only if you had gone insane! That is something that you have hidden away in the deepest recesses of your heart. But then….if you had told him, would the ending have been different?
You would no longer be just a random young man Yun Ge met in Chang An. You would not be just a man she met two or three years ago. You are just like him, carefully protecting that green embroidered shoe. Your persistence and your protection, likely you might even have realized how deep it was. Maybe you wavered once, and that waver hurt Yun Ge to her core. But from the moment you realized where your heart was, you were never weaker than him, not one bit. Perhaps you are not as perfect as he is, you are not as unwavering. But is not the surety that comes from wavering, the decision that comes from struggling, all of that like a phoenix rising from the ashes reborn? A precious gem that has been cut only becomes more beautiful.
You, who never deigns to explain anything:
I actually hate guys who are very sensitive, the ones who suffer any little slight and have to immediately talk about it. I always believe actions speak louder than words! If there was a guy complaining like the neighborhood auntie about how much he’s suffering, how much he cares, I would probably smash him over the head with a bat! But…..but……sometimes I wish you said more! You could have shared even just a little bit about your own suffering.
Do you know something? From volume 1 until chapter 11 of volume 3, a total of five hundred thousand characters, you never once told Yun Ge directly how you feel about her. The first time, you were teasing about it. The second time, you joked that you would tell your daughter that her mother insisted on marrying her father, as a confirmation of the marriage promise. The third time, in the Palace, you said you were a man of your word. Meng Jue ah? What the heck promise are you keeping your word on? You merely like her, really like her, like her so much you want to spend the rest of your life with her. So why couldn’t you come out and just say it?
When I’m angry, so so angry and have decided to wage a cold war with my husband for a week, when he hugs me and says “I love you, let’s not fight anymore”, I immediately stop being angry. His one word “I love you” is more powerful than any explanation or excuse, any discussion of who is right or wrong. I don’t know if I should chalk your behavior up to your pride, or the fact that you feel guilty. Because you know deep down that you did seriously consider choosing Huo Cheng Jun, that it wasn’t all just stringing her along, that you did consider betraying your marriage promise to Yun Ge. So you feel like you betrayed your feelings for her. People say that it’s actions more important than words to determine if someone loves you. But Meng Jue, you didn’t have any definitive action or words with Yun Ge! She saw you with her own eyes embracing Huo Cheng Jun. You didn’t even ask her where she saw it, because you know that she might have seen more, known more.
From the beginning when you were serious about Huo Cheng Jun, until you wavered, and then later just tried to drag it out, it wasn’t just one embrace by then. Seeing Yun Ge’s pain, perhaps you really had no way to explain. Do you know that Ling gege, when Yun Ge was rejecting him, he just played on his flute the tune “De Yin Bu w.a.n.g” (Never forget a kindred spirit)? That was a raw and powerful love song! Meng Jue, you tell me, what is there left for me to say?
My thoughts:
Meng Jue is such a hard leading man to love, and Ling gege is such an easy leading man to love. The former is a study in contradictions and internal struggle, the latter is a study in selflessness and steadiness. But it’s not so easy to just say one guy is good and the other is bad, or which one loves Yun Ge more, or who is better for her. None of that ultimately matters, because the story puts all the characters into a world that is outside their control. All they can control is their own actions, but one can’t live in a void. So when you add their emotions to outside forces pus.h.i.+ng up against them, then the story is so understandable in its narrative progression. In my first read I thought Tong Hua forced so many circ.u.mstances to jolt her story, but I don’t think that anymore. There remains still one single scene that I cringe to reread, and I feel like she might have elected not to go there, but then would the emotional gordian knot between Yun Ge and Meng Jue be easily untied without it? I don’t know.
I love Liu Fu Ling, I might even love him more then I love Huo Qu Bing. I can’t tell or compare, because these two men are so completely different I can’t imagine two people more different. I’m pleased that I don’t go for one certain type of fictional leading men, but rather I do find myself connecting with characters within the narrative of how they exist. In real life Ling would probably bore me to death since he’s so restrained and mellow, and Qu Bing would have turned me homicidal with his a.s.sertive tendencies to decide things for me.
In that void, I have to agree with the consensus that Meng Jue is the most realistic and flesh and blood male lead Tong Hua has ever written. I can imagine living a life with him, the daily routine, growing old, finding joy and contentment in the every day. He’s so talented, so unexpected, so full of every emotion that he keeps hidden. If Ling gege is Yun Ge’s soulmate, then Meng Jue is genuinely her ideal life partner. But YZG is not just the life of the three of them, they live within the maelstrom of Chang An, of the Palace, of outside forces long ago set into motion that give them no respite from their struggles. It would be so easy to say that Yun Ge can lose Ling gege and end up with Meng Jue, and despite my berating her to death in volume 3 for all the torment she put Jue through, I’ve come to accept that it cannot be. Yun Ge and Ling gege is “destined but not fated to be” and Yun Ge and Jue is “fated to be but not destined” if I were to switch up the Chinese proverb for why some couples meet but cannot end up together. I shall leave you with a snap shot moment between Ling and Yun Ge that just encapsulates their relations.h.i.+p. So little is said, but so much is conveyed. I find peace and solace in their relations.h.i.+p, because in the hurricane that is Chang An politics, they are the one pure thing untainted by any darkness.
……………………………………………………………….
Yun Ge took the oars from him. “Let your lady servant, I, row the boat. Perchance which dock would the young master like to go?”
Liu Fu Ling, with one hand on the boat steer and one hand on his chest, laughed “Wherever the young lady would like to go, then I shall go there.”
Yun Ge held the oars and rowed towards the direction of the sunset. A huge red round setting sun turned the little boat into a tiny reflection. The faint sounds of laughter wafted out from the scent of the lilies.
“If your lady servant, I, want to go to the edge of the sky?”
“I shall accompany you.”
“To the horn of the ocean?”
“I shall accompany you.”
“To the top of the mountain?”
“I shall accompany you.”
The light had waned and Yun Ge suddenly realized they have been playing on the lake for quite some time.
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