One day in late June 2010, a poster was posted at the entrance of the One Way Street Bookstore in Beijing’s Blue Harbor: “Lingerie Design Master Yu Xiaodan and Julia Breitwieser: Telling the Secrets of Lingerie Design”. If I wasn’t very familiar with the name “Yu Xiaodan”, I probably wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with putting a high hat on her as a “lingerie design master”, but because I was familiar with her, I was shocked: Is this the Yu Xiaodan I know so well? She translates and writes novels, I know that, but she is also a “master of lingerie design”! Isn’t that a bit too far away? Maybe because her daily work is not related to me and I have never appreciated her lingerie design, so I seldom associate her with lingerie design in my life. Now that I’ve seen the manuscript of her book “The Inner Show”, I’m a little ashamed. Although she said “master” is just a bookstore advertising slogan, but I finally know: this clear and beautiful Yu Xiaodan, the small mute voice of Yu Xiaodan, sometimes sickly Yu Xiaodan, once she eats good food will be happy to smile Yu Xiaodan, even the smallest thing can make her cry Yu Xiaodan, but has gone so far in the road of lingerie design!
I’m not sure how far I’ve come.
The Yu Xiaodan I have ingrained in my head is another person, the Chinese translator of American author Nabokov’s big-name novel Lolita. There are now more than a dozen translations of Lolita in China, and Xiaodan’s is one of the earliest, published in 1989 by Jiangsu Wenyi Press. The Lolita I read was translated by her. Because I read her translation early, I felt that no one’s translation was right afterwards. Yu Xiaodan’s true origin is in English and American literary studies. She worked as an editor for the journal Foreign Literature Review at the Institute of Foreign Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and studied Nabokov, Beckett, Raymond Carver, and so on. To write this preface, I dug out her published books from my bookshelf, and there are so many of them, including her edited The Rose Tree-The World’s Best Prose Essays-British Volume, her translation of Nabokov’s Lolita, Raymond Carver’s What Are You Doing in San Francesco? . None of these books, strangely enough, were actually given to me by her; I bought them all myself from the bookstore. This in me, quite telling of how important these books are to me.
In 2009, Yu Xiaodan published her full-length novel, The Lovers of 1980. This time she gave me the book, as if it was the only one she really valued herself. I used to know that she wrote something, but she rarely said what she was writing about, so I didn’t know much about it. I didn’t expect her to write a full-length novel. The novel was first published in Contemporary Magazine, then by the People’s Literature Publishing House, and soon made it into the 2009 long-form novel list of the Chinese Novel Society. Later on, it seems that she was approached to sign a contract to turn the novel into a movie. This kind of writing, publishing, and publication experience is unreal for a writer, just like Yu Xiaodan “suddenly” became a “master of lingerie design”, which doesn’t sound real either. She is constantly creating surprises, but when we meet and talk, she always laughs and says something else. But she’s got a little pride inside, I guess.
“The Lovers of 1980” is about the love and death of young people back in the day. The characters in the book (students of foreign languages since elementary school), the tone of their speech (especially the Beijing accent in it), some of the scenes, some of the background of the story, are all familiar to me. I’ve been restraining myself from dwelling on the youthful past of the 1980s, trying not to get nostalgic and just moving forward until one day I settle into a truly personal view of history. But reading Xiaodan’s book, sharing her memories, her sensitivity, her meticulous and unique observations, her immersion and sentimentality, I thought: Maybe I shouldn’t restrain myself like this. Maybe. The 1980s, the story of our generation’s youth, is truly unique in this world.
Yu Xiaodan, as a novelist, has her bohemian side. She sometimes appears in front of you in a delicate silk but with a pair of rustic shoes of some unknown ethnicity on her feet. In the mid-1990s, she left the Academy of Social Sciences and went to the United States, where she became a lingerie designer. I can’t really say much about lingerie, especially women’s lingerie, but I recognize another Yu Xiaodan from the path she took to lingerie design, somewhat petty, tasteful, careful, idealistic, loving beauty, to the point of being (perhaps) a little capricious, a little crazy, and even, (perhaps) a little hysterical.
Xiaodan told me that when she was in elementary school, the boys and girls in her class had teamed up to criticize her for having serious “petty-bourgeois tendencies. The school’s atmosphere and social customs should still be stuck in the “Cultural Revolution” period. I think maybe it was her “petty bourgeois tendencies” that made her what she was. The good side of “petty bourgeoisie” is that it makes you strive to be different in life, to walk in a different direction in terms of aesthetics and taste; at a certain time, it makes you more persistent in your adherence to humanity. Xiaodan’s “petty” reminds me of the time when I was a university student in the early 1980s, when a literary master in the Chinese department of our school once commented that I also had a “petty bourgeois mood”. I also remembered the self-deprecation of theater director Meng Jinghui, who said he had “proletarian sentiments and petty-bourgeois sentiments”! In a hard socialist environment, we have been entangled with soft “petty capitalism” for so long!
I know Xiaodan’s “petty capital” because we were childhood friends and graduated from the same school: the Foreign Language School affiliated to the Beijing Foreign Language Institute. It was a boarding school, and we both entered elementary school and went on to college from there. At that time, it seemed to be the only boarding school in Beijing. One of the characteristics of boarding school students was that everyone was like a family. Xiaodan was younger than me and was my school sister. The first time I met her, she must have been ten years old.
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In 2009, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Foreign Language School, the alumni association edited and printed a large commemorative album. I turned to a group photo of Yu Xiaodan and her classmates when they were studying – she was so small, childish and cute at that time. At that time, did she have a heart for literature or a heart for lingerie design? I guess it’s the former, I’m afraid that girls at that time also have little knowledge of lingerie, just like love and sex. I am still not sure what kind of condition the lingerie design in China is at present. The famous Japanese poet Ganro Sasaki used to work for a Japanese clothing company and was in charge of market research. He told me that he used to make a trip to China every year to Shanghai and Beijing to investigate the changes in the styles and sizes of Chinese women’s lingerie, and to observe the impact of China’s economic development on Chinese women’s lifestyles. After reading the manuscript of “Inside Show”, I agreed more with the experience of Ganro Sasaki, that the development of lingerie does follow the development of society, and Xiaodan is not only observing with the eyes of a lingerie designer, but also experiencing with her literary heart. Many of her stories are like ready-made literary stories about people of different colors and their encounters in this business. I’m sure there are some lingerie designers in China, but those with a literary temperament like hers must be a rare breed.
After graduating from the Foreign Language Institute, especially after she left for the United States, we didn’t really see much of each other until early 2007, when I went to New York University for a semester to teach in the East Asian Department. When I first arrived at NYU, I ran into Yu Xiaodan (whose husband, Mr. Liao, teaches at NYU) on the street next to the East Asia Department office building. This reunion made me realize immediately that I would never lose my friend Xiaodan again (either in the US in 2007 or after I returned home).
When I reunited with her, she had been living in New York for more than a decade, but she still sounded enthusiastic about the city. I seemed a little surprised then, but now that I’ve read her book manuscript, I think I know a little bit about why. A city that makes people’s dreams come true must have its own unique charm and vitality, and although Xiaodan’s book is about only one hidden part of the city – the world of lingerie designers – that world carries her curiosity, love and regret for New York.
Every time she returns to the country, our two families are less likely to eat, talk and shop. She also follows me around Panjiayuan like a little tail, buying little jade pieces and old embroidery pieces – all of which are probably related to her lingerie designs. Julia, mentioned at the beginning of this article, is a good friend of Xiaodan’s, and I took her to Panjiayuan alone when she came to Beijing in the summer of 2010, just when Xiaodan was sick. I guess this is probably what Xiaodan wants to say in her book: even in the most frenetic, noisy and vain external environment (such as the garment industry she works in), we should still pay more attention to our inner self. I’m sure many of the readers of this book will be young girls, and I hope that after reading the interesting stories in the book, they will also realize that the more beautiful the dream seems to be, the easier it is to break it, and the more important it is to have more “inner show”. Women’s underwear may seem the least important, but because of Xiaodan, I now think it is almost the most recent work of the centrifuge.
Congratulations to Yu Xiaodan for publishing this book, “The Inner Show. It is a book about a world that most of us don’t know much about, and she has been wandering in it for a long time with a sense of humor.