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The above passage reads indeed like a filmed sequence with carefully controlled lighting and color. Naturally Ang Lee and his talented Mexican director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto, conjure up an atmosphere that is appropriate to this passage, at least to this viewer. However, in Chang's written manuscript, none of this happens. Without these added paragraphs, as Chang might have realized, we have only Mr Yee's point of view, except for a glimpse of a faint sorrowful smile on his face' presumably from Wang Chia-chih, whose gaze is only implied and her inner feelings unrevealed. Can she fall in love at this one glance? Of course we can never really know Eileen Chang's intentions. (In academic criticism, to gauge author's intentions is considered a fallacy.) To add more romance? More drama? Or more psychological nuance in the heroine? Whatever the reasons, the text itself is certainly enriched.

Having compared this paragraph in the two versions of the text, it's really a letdown to read the screenplay. This is how the last paragraph quoted above is rendered: 'He takes her hand and looks at the ring. With the manager watching them, they are more keenly aware of their being alone under the lamp, so close, yet so restrained.'And the crucial hint about his faint smile becomes: 'With his profile outlined against the soft lamplight, he looks to her tender and vulnerable-a man in love.'Are you so sure this experienced spy and womanizer (played with consummate restraint by Tony Leung) is really a man in love, or do you side with her and believe that he is? If he were, why would Eileen Chang have seen fit to provide, in the story's final part, all the necessary rationalizations for his not being in love?

The very last paragraph in this addition, which represents Eileen Chang's final revision of the text, becomes in fact quite romantic, and the English translation has made it even more so: 'Only now, as this last, tense moment of calm stretched infinitely out, on this cramped balcony, the artificial brightness of its lamplight contrasting grubbily with the pale sky visible through the door and windows downstairs, could she permit herself to relax and inquire into her own feelings. Somehow, the nearby presence of the Indian, bent over his writing desk, only intensified her sense of being entirely alone with her lover. But now was not the moment to as和_圖_書k herself whether she loved him; instead she needed to…'

The story ends on a note of cynicism, a mark of literary irony with perhaps an implied historical dimension. In my Chinese articles, I have tried to flesh out this historical dimension-perhaps too much so-in order to counter the usual tendency among Chinese readers and viewers to equate fictional characters with real historical personages. This is certainly not in Eileen Chang's design. Interestingly, Ang Lee's American collaborator, James Schamus, is far more forthright in his interpretation of the story. In his introduction to this new book (also included in the paperback edition which, however, does not contain the screenplay and the production notes), Schamus comes straight to his point: 'Why did she do it?……What act, exactly, does Wang Chia-chih perform at that fateful moment in the jeweler's shop when she decides whether or not to go through with the murder of her lover? ' And he provides a clear-cut answer: 'And here, two words - act and perform - indicate the troubling question Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) asks us: for at the crucial moment when we choose, when we decide, when we exercise our free will, are we not also performing? ' (p, xi) Well said, but a little biased.

Ang Lee's most recent film, (色,戒) (Lust, Caution), has become 'the talk of town' in Hong Kong.

Interestingly, even the screenplay (which is not rendered in at detailed shot-by-shot format) is sketchy in its description. The first sequence of their lovemaking is described in a few telling details: 'He flips her around facedown on to the bed, unbuckles his pants, and enters her from behind. What follows is more or less a rape. Her face opens, first in pain, then in an astonished, anguished mix of anger and pleasure. ' (p. 175 of the book) The second sequence is described in only two sentences: 'Naked, on the bed, Yee on top of her-he takes her face in his hands, insisting that she look in his eyes. Afterward, they hold each other. ' (p. 181) The third sequence has a few short sentences, showing her 'straddling him, slowly moving' while the camera points to a shot of his clothes, gun and holster on the chair next to the bed.' Her eyes drift to the gun, then back to him. As she rides him harder, tears start to flow from her eyes. '(p. 192) Thus sex is shown as increasingly mixing with her mounting emotm.hetubook.com.comion-hence her tears. Would Eileen Chang like it if she were alive and saw the film?

As for myself, an equally biased Chinese critic straddling between both worlds, I have found my loyalties divided between Eileen Chang and Ang Lee. But after three viewings of the film, I have finally opted for Lee because deep down I believe in film magic which can sometimes displace textual fidelity. Besides, who knows, if she were alive today Eileen Chang might make yet another revision of the story?

But let's not pursue our prurient interest further, except to say that for Ang Lee the story must have touched him profoundly on an emotional level, thus he wanted to underscore the sexual-emotional linkage by inserting these three crucial bedroom scenes. This certainly departs from the style and perhaps intention of the original story. But does Ang Lee have justification for putting so much 'lust'in a story about deceit and 'caution'? This brings us back to the written manuscript.

Aside from putting the full emotional weight on the heroine (hence a great risk in hiring a totally new face, Tang Wei), Ang Lee's own point of interpretive entry is the six-carat diamond ring (only four carats in the manuscript version) that the hero buys for the heroine; the Chinese character can have several meanings, including or ring, aside from 'caution', the basic rule of the spy game. (Of course one can also associate the term with Christian and Buddhist connotations-commandments and taboos such as 'thou shall not commit adultery' or beyond the 'cycle of desire'and lust etc.)

One possibility is the politically sensitive nature of the story itself, which is set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai (1941-45) and has a 'traitor' as hero, the security chief of the collaborationist 汪精衛 (Wang Jingwei) regime. Since Chang's former husband 胡蘭成 (Hu Lancheng) also served under this 'puppet regime', Chang might have wanted to use extra caution. I pursued this line of conjecture before, until I read this newly published manuscript, which led me to pursue another possibility: Could it be that since Chang, for whatever reason, attached considerable importance to this story, she was never satisfied with it and kept revising to make it technically better? Is the final outcome really better than her first attempt? Besides, who knows if this written draft was indeed the 'ur-text'?

My own www.hetubook.com.comsense in playing the role of 'text-detective' is that even this written manuscript was the product of several revisions, because it contains several pages which are only half-filled and marked by the author's note 'continued on next page'. What were originally in such half-blank spaces? Paragraphs which were simply cut out? Or paragraphs which were so messy after revisions that the author simply wanted to copy them in a new page or rewrite them completely? Before the invention of the computer, both were normal practice for many writers.

The finished story seems to be so pruned of all unnecessary background details that its narration becomes oblique, even obscure, and requires utmost attention from the reader. In other words, our strategy as readers has to be some sort of close reading, in order to do justice to the text.

To take an obvious example: the personal information of the heroine 王佳芝 (Wang Chia-chih) is scanty in the original story. We only know from a few 'flash-back' sentences and passing references that she joined a drama group as a university student and became involved in a failed assassination plot. Well, this part of her 'deep background' is fully fleshed out in the movie. This is understandable. What remains most intriguing to me-and a bone of contention among many critics-is whether Ang Lee has enough justification to put in so much 'lust' and emotion, especially on the part of the ingénue heroine. This brings us to the film's most notorious feature, the three bedroom scenes, which are certainly not in the original story.

If we compare the manuscript and published versions of the story, the most visible addition is in the jewelry shop sequence. As the publisher of this new edition points out in the preface, in the final published version of the story Chang added some 700 Chinese characters or about two printed pages right after the point when Wang Chia-chih, with Mr Yee's approval, decides to buy the ring from the Indian jeweler (pp. 37-39 in the Chinese version; pp. 36-38 in the English version). These added paragraphs, in my view, serve definitely to enrich the emotional content on Wang Chia-chih's part at this critical moment of the plot: she is suddenly overwhelmed with emotion and hence commits an act of betrayal by urging him to 'go now'('run fast' in the Chinese original). Yes, in this added 'free indirect meditathttps://www.hetubook.com.comion' that reads like (but not exactly) a 'stream of consciousness' sequence, she realizes that she loves him！ And this transformation from lust to romantic love is prefigured in two indirect quotes: "The English say that power is an aphrodisiac 'but ' a well-known Chinese scholar (certainly the notorious 辜鴻銘 Gu Hongming, a conservative scholar educated at Edinburgh) was supposed to have added that the way to a woman's heart is through her vagina.'To present-day feminist ears, the latter sounds especially distasteful and male chauvinist. Yet it provides something of an excuse for Ang Lee to add his sex scenes and to underscore the link between sex and love.

As all lovers of classical music-and I count myself as one of them know very well, there is such a thing as an 'ur-text, ' the original text by the composer, sometimes coupled with several revisions. The existence of such texts complicates matters of music performance and interpretation. In Eileen Chang's case, we all know that this particular story was first written in 1950, but Chang kept revising it before it was finally published in Taiwan in 1977. Why did she keep revising it? We can only guess.

Let me begin this time with Chang's story itself. (There is an English translation by Julia Lovell in the tie-in book.)

Having written several articles in Chinese, I thought I should really stop-enough is enough. Yet here's another piece, this time in English, triggered by two new books which I found in a local bookstore: a brand new movie 'tie-in' volume called Lust Caution: The Story, the Screenplay, and the Making of the Film (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007) and a new limited edition of (色,戒) (Taipei: Crown, 2007), which includes the original manuscript of the story hand-written by 張愛玲 (Eileen Chang) herself.

Does Wang Chia-chih in the story really have the free will to make a free choice unencumbered by historical circumstances and the weaknesses of her own character? I think Schamus' assertion, derived perhaps from his own Western post-Enlightenment position, may win accolades from feminists but certainly does not accord with either Eileen Chang or to the context in which the story took place and was written. By any stretch of the imagination, Wang Chia-chih is not a Nora-like emancipated woman, nor is her betrayal comparable to the Phraedra-like heroine in O'Neill's play based on the Greek m•heｔｕｂｏｏk•coｍ•ｃoｍmyth, Desire under the Elms. She still is a modem Chinese woman caught in her own time and the ironic frame of Eileen Chang's fiction. I think it's to Ang Lee's great credit that, whether or not he has departed from Eileen Chang's original vision, the film version is much more nuanced and complex than is indicated by this simple assertive theme of free choice, notwithstanding Schamus' s scholarly citation of Slavoj Žižek's arcane theory about 'acting' and 'performing'. And to that extent, I think Ang Lee, despite his long years in the United States, is still a Chinese director.

Many uninitiated Chinese readers of the story have complained of its difficulty and the obscurity of meaning for, unlike other Eileen Chang stories such as 傾城之戀 (Love at the Fallen City) (my own favorite), the characters' inner feelings are hidden in a narrative device in which a detached yet omniscient narrator's voice only occasionally intrudes upon the characters' psyches, thus 'showing' but never 'telling' their thinking or feeling processes. In Chang's earlier stories, this narrator's voice is often present in the foreground of the story, her intrusions expressed in a number of brilliantly inventive metaphors, but in Lust, Caution it's nearly unnoticeable. (Julia Lovell, the translator, in her introduction to the story, uses a semi-technical phase, 'free indirect meditation'). How can a film director turn this narrative technique into a film language based primarily on visual images? There is no 'voice-over' in the film itself, I many scenes are not found in the original story-or, as Ang Lee would argue, only implied. In other words, Ang Lee tries to fill up all these 'blanks'-shady subplots or repressed emotions that lurk behind the surface of the main story-line.

The director 李安 (Ang Lee), surely an Eileen Chang fan himself, must have read the story countless times before he and his frequent collaborator, James Schamus, wrote up a preliminary treatment or film scenario, which was turned into a full screenplay in both English and Chinese by Schamus and王蕙玲 (Wang Hui Ling), a veteran writer in Taiwan. I have reason to believe that even though Schamus knows no Chinese, he must have had a heavy hand in the writing of the screenplay itself. In a way, the screenplay in English (the Chinese version is yet to be published) and the translation help us understand the original story better.