Private Issues, Public Discourse: The Life and Times of Yu Luojin

Abstract

yu LuoJIN achieved instant notoriety in 1980 with the publication of her scarcely-fictionalized autobiographical story A Winter's Fairy Tale in a Peking literary magazine.' The story created a sensation among university students, who cut classes and abandoned homework when their turn came to read one of the hard-to-find copies of the issue, which had sold out almost as soon as it was published. For several weeks after the story appeared, heated arguments about Yu Luojin's life dominated conversations at universities throughout China. Almost everyone took sides: some sympathized with her as a social victim; some heralded her as a liberated woman; some denounced her as a morally bankrupt opportunist. A Winter's Fairy Tale is essentially the story of Yu Luojin's-and her family's-tragic experiences during the Cultural Revolution, the circumstances under which she married, subsequently fell in love with someone else, and finally divorced her husband. The story itself is remarkable not as literature, but as a social document, for it is a uniquely candid record of a young woman's experiences with and attitudes towards love, marriage, sex, and divorce. Perhaps even more remarkable than the story itself is the debate it triggered-a debate about the nature of love, marriage, and the morality of divorce. It was in the context of discussing Yu Luojin's story that, for the first time in over a decade, many of these private issues became the subject of public discourse. The debate was not restricted to the contents of the story itself, for almost everyone knew that after the divorce she describes in her story, Yu had remarried and was in the process of requesting a second divorce.