The Butcher's Wife
PREFACE
After receiving my M.A. degree from an American university in 1977, I decided to see some of the country before returning to Taiwan, so I traveled around the United States for the better part of a year. It was during that time, at the California home of a friend, that I happened upon a book in which a news item about the sensational murder of a man by his wife in Shanghai in the 1930s had been reprinted.
What drew me to this particular story of husband killing was the fact that it was not just another case of adultery. In traditional Chinese society, any woman who kills her husband is presumed to have done so because of an extramarital affair; there could be no reason for committing the heinous crime of killing her own husband other than the desire to be with her lover. This demeaning attitude toward the moral character of women has been held by Chinese for thousands of years: any woman guilty of killing her husband is a promiscuous woman, and no other interpretation is possible.
But in this particular sensational case from Shanghai in the 1930s, the accused murderess insisted that she had killed her husband only to escape his abuses and that she was innocent of any extramarital involvements; the prosecution was unable to prove the existence of a “lover.” Thus, instead of being just another in a long line of women labeled promiscuous by society, the husband-killer in this case was a woman who had suffered the oppression of traditional society.
I wanted to use this item as the basis of a story, but since I knew virtually nothing about Shanghai, I abandoned my plans. It wasn’t until several years later, after I had returned to Taiwan, that I decided to move the setting of the story to my hometown of Lugang, a small seacoast town in central Taiwan that had once been the island’s second largest city but was now just another small town that retained the flavor of “old Taiwan.” And so, the basic elements of a sensational murder case that had actually occurred in Shanghai were transported to Taiwan and transformed into a story of old Taiwanese society.
I cannot deny that I approached the writing of The Butcher’s
Wife with a number of feminist ideals, wanting to show the tragic fate that awaited the economically dependent Taiwanese women living under the rules of traditional Chinese society. But as I wrote, I found myself becoming more and more concerned with larger issues of humanity, such as hunger, death, sex. What I want to emphasize here is that the ultimate concern of a piece of “feminist literature” is, after all, human nature.
In writing The Butcher’s Wife I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my hometown of Lugang; were it not for the many special charms of that place, this story would never have been written.
Naturally, I want also to thank the translators, who have made this work available to a new group of readers.