Jeannie Lin | The Hidden Poetry of The Lotus Palace

There's an interesting phenomenon where Western culture assigns a special mystique to Chinese characters. The symbols seem to contain a special power, a mystical meaning. It's like a secret code and we all love secrets.

During the 17^th and 18^th century, Chinese design was considered exotic and Western artists would copy the look of Chinese paintings, ceramics and architecture. The art form was dubbed, "Chinoiserie" and sometimes featured strange chicken scratch symbols that really weren't Chinese characters at all.

The fascination continues today with people inking characters onto their skin even when they can't read them, which of course leads to some amusing misinterpretations!

The truth is - these characters do have power. There's an internal poetry to the way that Chinese characters are composed. For instance, let's look at the traditional character for love or ‘ai'.

I've seen and heard it explained different ways. Wikipedia states that ""Ai," the traditional Chinese character for love (?) consists of a heart (?, middle) inside of "accept," "feel," or "perceive," (?) which shows a graceful emotion."

From an explanation from a calligraphy master Paul Wang is that the character depicts how "love breathes life into our hearts and brings grace to our movements".

Because language is thought and thought is language, intertwined and inseparable, there's an internal poetry to Chinese culture and way of thinking. This poetry can be hard to capture if you're not a speaker of Chinese (I confess, I don't know Chinese.)

Sometimes the attempt to recreate this poetry can come out corny and fortune cookie like.

But if done correctly, I think it taps into something emotional inside of us in a way that's visual and visceral and inherently beautiful. We say a picture is worth a thousand words. In some ways, a Chinese word is worth a thousand words.

In THE LOTUS PALACE (8/27), this worship of the Chinese language is one of the themes that flows throughout the hero and heroine's love affair. Bai Huang, the hero, comes from a family of poets and scholars, though he himself is seen as a failure. He's failed the imperial exams twice and now hangs out drinking and flirting with courtesans in the pleasure quarter. The heroine Yue-ying is a maidservant who is illiterate and thus locked out of this elite world.

How will the two find love when they in essence speak two very different languages, divided by class, education and experience? The answer took me 95,000 words, but hopefully their struggle and their story encompasses some of the beauty, grace and complexity of those thirteen strokes.