Life in the Fortress

I first read Fortress Besieged as a teenager, when the novel, originally published in 1947 and out of print for decades, became a bestseller in China after it was adapted into a TV series in 1990. The book was so popular that its characters quickly became, in the public imagination, types—in fact, archetypes—as though a mere reference to the name of this or that character was enough to summarize the essence of an acquaintance or a family member. Memorable lines from the novel circulated. An old woman selling steamed buns by the roadside was likely to repeat to a young couple pondering her goods that “if men don’t get enough to eat, they’ll get irritable”—words spoken by Sun Jou-chia, a Vera Rostova–like character who has won a competi­tion to become the wife of Fang Hung-chien, the hero of the novel, only to have the same epiphany as Vera did in War and Peace, that men are more or less children, to be put up with and to be put under discipline. A high school student could cite the epigraph of the novel to a friend—“Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are out­side want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out”—and surmise that the metaphor would apply to more ...