Fortress Besieged

"Fortress Besieged is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th-century Chinese literature, and rightly so. I was introduced to it in the early 1980s by my first boyfriend, and while the novel holds emotional value for me, it also left a deep impression because of the writing, which felt unlike anything I had encountered before — ironic, urbane, and blisteringly sharp. It is a sharp reflection of Chinese intellectuals then and now. Qian Zhongshu has a rare gift for wit that skewers both individuals and society with equal elegance. The novel follows Fang Hongjian, a young Chinese intellectual returning from Europe with a fake PhD, who stumbles into a farcical marriage and a disastrous university job. The famous metaphor in the title says it all: “Marriage is like a fortress besieged — those outside want to get in, and those inside want to get out.” It’s funny, poignant and ruthlessly observant. Qian’s descriptions are wickedly precise. I still remember the passage where he writes about Tang Xiaofu, Fang’s romantic interest, describing her beauty as “a whiff of fragrance in a stinking world — it can only soften the stench, not remove it.” The novel is filled with such lines: beautifully crafted, painfully true. Fang himself is a perfect antihero — vain, indecisive, full of pretence, and yet strangely sympathetic. He’s a stand-in for a whole generation of educated, directionless men caught between East and West, tradition and modernity."