The Rape Novel: A Personal Story
The reality of rape through Lin Yi-Han's Fang Si Chi's First Love Paradise
To start, I want to grab you by your figurative shoulders and say, please read this book. Because, a while ago, I’d read that Western publishers receive a lot of novels and memoirs from survivors of assault about assault, and those publishers all but ignore them, considering them unpublishable and uninteresting. A handful, notably, Chanel Miller’s Know My Name make it through, but they’re often based on the person (or their story’s) fame, and so, aren’t wholly the story of rape but instead about fascination, curiosity, and often, about credibility.
Going against that trend is this book, Lin Yi Han’s Fang Si Chi’s First Love Paradise (2017, trans 2024). Harper-Collins calls it “one of the biggest books to come out of Taiwan in the last decade”, and it focuses on the repeated rape of a legal and literal child. It’s the first and only novel by Lin. “Only” is telling, because like another young female Taiwanese author, Qiu Miaojin, Lin also took her life at the age of twenty-six. That link to Qiu Miaojin is also telling in that both Lin and Qiu write intensely, in Lin’s case, her writing is full of metaphors, sometimes multiple metaphors in a single page, and there’s an rawness and emotional fever-pitch that they share that’s unlike any other author I’ve read. Both feel almost frightening to read, as if the women writing are beckoning you from the grave, welcoming you into their delicious gloom.
You’ve likely put the pieces together: Lin Yi-Han was raped, repeatedly, by her “cram” teacher, and Fang Si Chi’s First Love Paradise is a fictionalized telling of her real life experiences. If you hadn’t put that together yet, it’s because we avoid the topic (2), with a few clean-cut exceptions such as Chanel Miller or Gisèle Pelicot, whose stories are black-and-white, an unconscious victim and a plethora of evidence, where the survivor gets a rape kit, where her family and friends supports her. Those stories are seldom the reality, and Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise is more reflective of reality.
The novel starts off with two young women, Liu Yi-Ting and beautiful Fang Si-Chi, who live in a posh Taiwanese apartment building and are the best of friends. Closer than sisters, more like twins, possibly closer than that. They’re thoughtful and intelligent, girls who read serious literature, like Dream of the Red Chamber, Eileen Chang, Lu Xun (Lu Hsun), and Dostoevsky, you know the type or maybe you were that type, the type who know far more about characters than they do people in real life, and are subject to other student’s derision of them. Instead, their friends are the stunningly, astonishingly beautiful Iwen, who quit her PhD program to marry a wealthy older man after a very brief courtship, and who, like Lin, comes from a wealthy family, and she’d dropped out her studies. Their other friend is Teacher Lee (Lee Guo-Hua), a book-quoting, highly reputable and successful cram tutor1.
The three girls, Liu Yi-Ting, Iwen, and Fang Si-Chi, are different versions of the same woman, seemingly representative of Lin Yi Han herself. A few months into the marriage, Iwen’s husband begins to beat her. She loves him enough to stay in the marriage and puts up with his demanding and domineering mother for him. When she becomes pregnant, he beats her so severely that she loses the baby, and nearly loses her life. Teacher Lee finds her attractive, but Iwen seems to find him faintly repulsive. She’s puzzled as to why the girls - Liu Yi-Ting and Fang Si-Chi - are so infatuated with him, why they can’t see through limited knowledge and oily falseness. They’re only thirteen. Teacher Lee plots a way to tutor the middle class girls for free, offering each a few hours a week, separately. Lin repeatedly writes of how plain Liu Yi-Ting, and she finds a lot of value in Teacher Lee’s help with her essays. Lin also repeatedly, repeatedly, tells the reader that Fang Si-Chi is beautiful, pale, tiny, and innocent baby-lamb-like, and through her stories of Iwen and Fang, falsely creates the impression that only the most beautiful women are subject to this type of abuse. Because almost immediately, Teacher Lee rapes white-and-pure-as-the-driven-snow Fang Si-Chi. Like so many other victims, prior victims of Teacher Lee and the real life, well-educated, often accomplished adult survivors I speak to, Fang Si-Chi’s method of coping is to try to convince herself that the rape is love, but she still feels contaminated. Far into the abuse, Si-Chi tells Liu Yi-Ting that Teacher Lee is her boyfriend, and like so many real-life friends of survivors, Yi-Ting isn’t exactly supportive. Actually, she’s downright cruel. Teacher Lee, of course, plays into societal reactions, manipulating the child, raping her repeatedly, from the time she’s thirteen, through the next five years. The abuse becomes easier when Si-Chi’s parents send her and Yi-Ting to Taipei, to share an apartment before they’re eighteen, for their education. Teacher Lee’s got a secret apartment where he takes young girls, and a team at the school that help set up young student to be groomed and raped by him. The victim before Si-Chi tries to expose him on social media, she’s called all sorts of names, her boyfriend breaks up with her, her parents are upset, and, well, I could tell you that a lot of real life victims end up in similar situations. There’s an allusion to other victims (yes, plural) of Teacher Lee’s committing suicide, and roughly 33% of survivors contemplate suicide, and the mental health industry considers the psychological trauma of rape to be worse than the trauma of experiencing combat. Where does much of that trauma come from? My mentors (an advocate of over three decades and another of over two) and I both repeatedly hear that much of the trauma comes from the way other people react to the assault, oftentimes moreso than the assault/abuse itself. With Fang Si-Chi…Teacher Lee has isolated her and she has “stopped growing” as a person. She drinks too much coffee, stays up too many late nights, skips class, walks around in a daze, her memory is shot, her friendship with her best friend suffers, her friendship with Iwen is at times strained. Teacher Lee recognizes these as signs of PTSD. Those symptoms of Fang Si-Chi’s trauma, of course, can be used as a sort of evidence that she’s problematic, “crazy”, and if the long-term abuse were to be relieved, could be used to destroy her credibility and salvage himself. Using the survivor’s trauma to declare her to be unreliable is the most common tactic, it’s a story I’ve heard often, and it’s why so many survivors don’t come forward. She does eventually lose her mind, becomes a sort of vegetable. Liu Yi-Ting and Iwen go to a lawyer to get help to stop Teacher Lee, but the lawyer says that without physical evidence, the type that Chanel Miller and Gisèle Pelicot had, they had no case. This last part was something that was true for Lin Yi Han herself.
That’s the reality of assault. I can also tell you that I had a piece of evidence in regards to my rape: he confessed to it on Facebook. I had a friend take screenshots, I presented it to the police, a lady-officer who stared at me incredulously and repeatedly asked: “he posted this?”. Yes, officer, he did, I repeatedly answered. I still knew I had no case, I would know, not as a woman of color raped by a white man in America2, a woman texted me to tell me to kill myself because I was a “useless piece of meat”, my so-called friends still didn’t believe me and didn’t care about the screenshots of admission nor the screenshot and lead up to it that was an attempt to gaslight me into the silence of suicide, I lost nearly every friend I had prior, have almost no contact with my unsupportive family, I still feel angry when I think too hard about everything I’d gone through in the two years after I assaulted, which I usually don’t because I use that pain to help other people instead of allowing it to drive me to the headspace it took Lin Yi Han. I can tell you that the majority of folks I talk to tell me they find it “too depressing” to talk about assault, even in the theoretical, or that they’d rather not think about it. But, as the saying goes, “silence is violence”, and darkness and ignorance mean stories like mine will continue.
Publishers publish what will sell. Stories like mine and the ones I’ve heard are too “depressing” for the general American public3, to think deeply about something difficult is too hard for many people. That means, in the US anyway, a cut-and-dry-with-physical-evidence-and-no-ambiguity-nor-prior-relationship story like Chanel Miller’s memoir, or novels like A Little Life, with the author’s dramatized, voyeuristic, deeply inaccurate take on sexual trauma will outsell something that reflects the reality of sexual assault and abuse. That type of sensationalism, voyeuristically gawking at ever-escalating, never detailed assaults and abuses, are perhaps easier than getting into a survivor’s head as Fang Si Chi’s First Love Paradise does, easier for a reader than sitting with the uncomfortable reality of it. But that voyeurism is harmful in that it presents a false idea to readers, who aren’t informed enough to know the falsity of the idea, and seemingly take it for the reality of rape. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, the author of A Little Life said something that sounded very clearly as if she believed that some people4, like her character, the repeatedly abused, assaulted lawyer, Jude, should...be taken out of their misery. An idea that too many people like her believe and that end up infiltrating and influencing the thoughts of others, maybe unconsciously by people who may not even remember where their impression of sexual abuse and victims arose from, and finally, that they subject too many survivors, like Lin Yi-Han to. Lin’s life story reveals the reality of those types of views. To lose such an immense talent as Lin, who in her short time on earth, had a greater positive impact than most of us mortals ever will, speaks to a society that fails to become informed about sexual assault, abuse, to understand that responses to assault are varied and based on a multitude of factors, and repeatedly, consistently, constantly, fails survivors. Yet, Lin Yi-Han lives on in many ways: her novel has touched people in Taiwan, it’s the most harrowing, deeply affecting read I’ve read in 2024, and because of her - with her family’s support and backing - the law in Taiwan was changed, requiring the legal names of tutors at cram schools to be accessible to the public.
Usually, I write something like “should you choose to read this” in my reviews. With this review, I’d instead like to say, please read this. I read this in one night, sometimes needing to take a deep breath. If I can read it after despite having trauma from assault, and if I can hear hundreds of survivor stories and support them through it so can you. You, too, can choose to be educated and informed so that if need be, you can make life a little bit less grim for a survivor(s). Today, many people (including myself) consider Gisèle Pelicot a heroine, because she wanted to flip the script and say that the men who raped her should be the ones who feel shame. Part of creating a a society that supports survivors is gaining the knowledge to do that, which is why books like this one matter, or things like the work I do5 matter. If not this, read something else that’s true and real about the reality of assault. Please care.
Taiwan, like other countries in Asia and Europe and the rest of the world that’s not the US, has an entrance exam that makes or breaks its student in terms of college and university admissions. A “cram” teacher/tutor tutors students to do well on the exam, and the general sense that the student’s score will have an enormous impact on their academic life and their career.
I have no idea if it would be different outside of America. Prior to this, I knew and had experienced racism, but this experience, and the accumulation of stories I’d heard (you can read a bit about this here) are why I care so deeply about racism.
I can’t say that it’s much better or worse in other places. But I wonder…because this novel was written and published in 2017, predating the US’s #metoo movement. Similarly, I’d argue that India’s #metoo reckoning came in 2012, with the Nirbhaya case, when the countries erupted into massive protests. Here in California, 96% of rape goes unreported (according to the California Department of Corrections), in the US one of five women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape, conviction rates are abysmally low, as in this book, lawyers don’t take on rape cases because the burden of evidence is too high and that evidence seldom exists, and there’s a lot of unwillingness to talk about it, which is the first step in improving those abysmal statistics.
I read the interview repeatedly, in disbelief, but I didn’t save it because - why save or further brood over an attitude that’s so damaging to myself and other survivors of abuse?
Do I sound arrogant? Very well. I am fairly proud of the work I’ve done, I know I’ve stopped more than one assault, helped many survivors, and there’s no reason - IMO - I should not be proud of that. Prouder than I am of anything else I’ve done with my life.