depicts a heroine who “becomes herself” only when she takes on the identity of another, for only behind the mask of the character Mai Tai-tai can Chia-chih truly desire, and thus truly live—playacting allows her to discover her one real love. But this is too reductive. For the performer always, by definition, performs for someone. And that audience, no matter how entranced, is always complicit: it knows deep down that the performance isn’t real, but it also knows the cathartic truth the performer strives for is attainable only when that truth is, indeed, performed. Yee doesn’t simply desire Mai Tai-tai while suspecting she is not who she says she is; it is precisely because he suspects her that he desires her. In this sense his desire is the same as hers: he wants to know her. And so lust and caution are, in Zhang’s work, functions of each other, not because we desire what is dangerous, but because our love is, no matter how earnest, an act, and therefore always an object of suspicion.If Chia-chih’s act at the end of the story is indeed an expression of love, it paradoxically destroys the very theatrical contract that made the performance of that love possible—in killing off her fictional character, she effectively kills herself.
