Chiung, who died last week at 86, was China’s most famous romance novelist. But what does her work mean in an era where young people seem uninterested in being swept off their feet?
On the afternoon of Dec. 4, 2024, 86-year-old romance novelist Chen Che — better known by her pen name Chiung Yao — took her own life. Her final video, shared posthumously on her Facebook account, showed Chiung in a vibrant red outfit, looking into the camera and saying: “This day has finally come... Life cannot be better.”
For those familiar with the writer’s life and work, the news of her death, while sad, was not entirely unexpected. Seven years ago, Chiung penned an open letter declaring her desire to die with dignity. She would refuse all major surgery, intensive care, and intubation, regardless of her health. Her greatest fear, she wrote, was not death itself but the prospect of dementia and incapacitation — conditions that claimed the final years of her second husband, Ping Hsin-tao.
In a sense, Chiung’s decision to end her life is a reflection of her deeply held philosophy. She was not just a writer who depicted life with intensity; she also lived that way. In her final letter to the world, Chiung wrote: “The beauty of life lies in being able to love, hate, laugh, cry, sing, speak, run, move, find companionship in the mundane world, and live freely and uninhibitedly.”
The placement of “being able to love” at the top of her list was no accident. It was that devotion to love and emotion above all else that won her millions of fans, first in Taiwan and Hong Kong, then later on the Chinese mainland in the 1980s. Readers hungry for tales of romance and individual perseverance over collective duty devoured her books: Among the writers of that era, her only real rival was Louis Cha, whose tales of vagabond wuxia martial artists and knights-errant targeted a very different audience. According to a 1986 media report, you couldn’t walk into a bookshop in Beijing without seeing a pile of Chiung’s works. That same year, her books received an unusual distinction: becoming the focus of a series of academic papers in the prestigious Chinese academic journal “Exploration and Debate.”
Many of these books were later adapted — often under Chiung’s watchful eye — into successful dramas. Shows like the “My Fair Princess Trilogy” ensured China’s so-called Chiung Yao fever would not break until well into the 21st century. Even her pen name could be a byword for passion. If someone exhibited too much interest in a romantic partner, they were often teasingly asked if they’d been binging Chiung Yao dramas.
A still from the 1999 TV series “My Fair Princess II.” From Douban
I myself used to be one of those love-crazed fans. When I was in middle school in the early 1990s, I stayed up countless nights in my dormitory reading every one of her books I could get my hands on. Eventually I noticed my writing style starting to change, as I developed a preference for Chiung-esque parallel sentences in dialogue, mixed in with a healthy dollop of exclamation marks. And naturally, I longed for a passionate love like the ones she wrote about — a sentiment shared by many of my female classmates.
Chiung’s understanding of love can be summarized as a kind of binary opposition: either you are in love, madly and completely so, or you are not. As I matured, this kind of simplistic approach to romance ceased to satisfy, but I never forgot Chiung’s impact on my life.
Eventually, Chinese society seemed to reach the same conclusion. In 2013, Chiung combined three of her novels into a new TV series called “Flowers in Fog,” which mixed romance, suspense, revenge, workplace politics, and family ethics. The drama had all the typical characteristics of past Chiung hits: beautiful male and female leads, a twisted love story, and poetic dialogue. But audiences weren’t impressed. Although the show garnered decent ratings, it became the subject of ridicule online.
A still from the 2013 TV series “Flowers In Fog.” From Douban
In the decade since, the notion that Chiung is “outdated,” or even “toxic,” has gained widespread currency online. The earliest critics focused on, of all things, her lack of morals. Many of Chiung Yao’s love stories involve extramarital affairs, and her detractors, many of them self-proclaimed feminists, seized on this point as well was the fact that Chiung’s relationship with her second husband, Ping, began while he was still married, to attack her for supposedly glorifying improper love and undermining traditional marriage.
If those critiques reflected a growing conservatism within Chinese society, the past two years have seen Chiung’s works beset by a very different attitude: indifference. If Chinese once dismissed Chiung’s books as “outdated,” now they seem to consider the very idea of love passé.
On social media, users are quick to criticize women who date as being “love-addled.” Slogans like “No kids, no ring, keep living serene” and “The wise never fall in love” are everywhere. There’s even a “breakup advice group” on Douban with over 370,000 members. Their motto? “Don’t do charity, and don’t pick up trash.”
Even those who claim to still believe in love approach relationships pragmatically, prioritizing conditions such as the other person’s background, appearance, finances, and education over how they feel. Think of it as the consumer approach to love: A relationship must produce pleasant feelings and cause no trouble.
A still from the 1993 TV series “Between Water and Clouds.” From Douban
Against this backdrop, Chiung’s brand of all-consuming, reckless passion strikes readers as almost comical. Her cheesy, ultra-romantic lines are easily parodied, and the dramatic outbursts of her heroes and heroines make more sense as memes than as genuine expressions of emotion.
I sometimes wonder whether these offhand mockeries conceal pain and fear. Personal feelings can seem increasingly insignificant given everything going on in the world today. While young people may still yearn for genuine connection, it’s no wonder that they might prefer to preemptively dismiss it as a possibility, rather than open themselves up to getting hurt. Burdened by societal pressures, they seek solace in cynicism, finding a semblance of control by devaluing love itself. Perhaps, beneath their derision lies a subconscious envy for the very passion they claim to find outdated.
One thing is certain, however: everything about Chiung, from her vibrant life to her deliberate departure, is a testament to a bygone era, one that dared to love with abandon and live without fear.
Wu Haiyun is an editor at Sixth Tone. She has a Ph.D. in cultural studies from East China Normal University, and was a visiting fellow at the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
(Header image: Visuals from IC and Douban, reedited by Sixth Tone)
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