A Vain Promise of Cattle and Sheep Beyond the Frontier

A Vain Promise of Cattle and Sheep Beyond the Frontier

Nalan Xingde once wrote, “If life could remain as it was at first sight, why should the autumn wind make one grieve over a painted fan?” In love, gaining someone is always a joy, while losing them has always been heartbreaking beyond words. Yet more often than not, even when two people truly love each other, they still become entangled in the anxieties of holding on and fearing loss, tossed between melancholy, jealousy, and delight. Falling in love with someone feels like setting sail across a vast ocean. And no matter how many times one has gone to sea in a lifetime, the storms are always the same as before, impossible to avoid. Between every gain and every loss, countless memories rise unbidden to the surface. Perhaps, in the course of an entire life, each person can experience only one love that sears itself into the bone. Everything after that is merely an elegant—or clumsy—repetition.

Among all the characters in Jin Yong’s fiction, Qiao Feng is perhaps the clearest embodiment of a classical Greek tragic hero. In him are concentrated the conflicts between family and country, ethnicity and nation, loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, and righteousness. But perhaps what truly drove Qiao Feng to his end was never these grand causes of nation and duty. Rather, after A’Zhu, whether he continued to exist in this world as Qiao Feng or Xiao Feng no longer mattered all that much to him. Just as he himself said after he had already become Xiao Feng: “Across all the lands under heaven, through ages upon ages, there is only one A’Zhu.” At that time, Qiao Feng wanted only to remain unmarried for the rest of his life, until the final moment before Yanmen Pass, when he resolved to follow A’Zhu in death. I think that if A’Zhu had still been alive then, perhaps even if he had suffered the humiliation of all the heroes under heaven, Qiao Feng might still have chosen to endure and go on living. If only he could be with A’Zhu, what would such things amount to? Anyone who has never loved with their whole being can never truly understand.

But if A’Zhu had lived, perhaps Qiao Feng’s love would never have become quite so profound. As Lo Ta-yu wrote in “Like an Old Friend Returning,” “What is never obtained, what is already lost, always seems the most perfectly matched.” A’Zhu is certainly a vivid and lively figure, yet the accident of dying by the hand of the man she loved perhaps made her image all the more perfect. When I first read Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, I only felt that Qiao Feng was a peerless hero under heaven—how could an obscure girl like A’Zhu possibly be worthy of him? But over the years, each time I return to the novel, I feel more strongly that perhaps in this world, other than A’Zhu, there was no one who could truly match Qiao Feng.

In Jin Yong’s writing, A’Zhu is filled with the gentle grace of a Jiangnan woman, yet also with the charm and quick-witted spirit of a young girl. These qualities beautifully complement the weathered, desolate, northern heroism that Qiao Feng carries within him. For readers like me, who grew up in the north, she left me from then on with a deep longing and fascination for Jiangnan. Later, when I read Dai Wangshu’s “Rainy Alley,” it seemed that from within that hazy impression there emerged just such a girl—“holding an oil-paper umbrella, filled with the same melancholy as lilacs.”

And yet such a perfect union, dazzling as linked pearls and matched jade, would be too beautiful to be true even in a fairy tale. Jin Yong’s novels are often regarded as fairy tales for adults. Compared with Gu Long’s world, where bloodshed is commonplace, relatively few characters die in Jin Yong’s fiction. Among them, A’Zhu may well be one of the most innocent and most pitiful. Her death is the shattering of a perfect love. And the sense of devastation brought by that shattering does not diminish with time or experience; rather, from that moment on, there is a bottomless abyss in one’s heart, like a black hole. From then on, the promise of cattle and sheep beyond the frontier becomes an empty one, and everything in this world has nothing more to do with love.