and that now she has thought of a way to get even. The revenge is
clearly symbolic, as it is the antagonist’s “shadow” 1 Ê, or her
memory of him, that the protagonist is planning to torture with salt,
vinegar, and desiccation before she finally chews him up and swallows
him with a burning mouthful of alcohol. The second stanza also pre-
supposes a comfortable old age for the narrator, at which point she
would be fully recovered from her psychic wounds and be able to treat
her former lover as a trifle.
Xia Yu appears to have been somewhat surprised by the response to
“Sweet Revenge,” which struck a powerful chord with her audience;
and she was unprepared for and uncomfortable with the commercial-
ism that accompanied the immense popularity of Memorandum
備=錄. She was disconcerted by the crass merchandising of the book’s
second printing; and she was deeply offended when, in a handicraft
shop, she came across a number of gift items emblazoned with the text
of “Sweet Revenge.”
I saw “Sweet Revenge” written on pencil holders, magazine racks
and chair cushions, all in an ultra artsy font... [the poem had been
given a] cheap, pretentious whiff of sterile culture, for the purpose of
mass marketing... they’d utterly destroyed the original line breaks... I
didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, [the whole thing] went entirely
against my original intent. (The world is full opportunities for disillu-
sionment, but isn’t it usually caused by some jerk who can’t help turning
something into a seat cushion?) The truth is, I like popular culture, pop-
ular songs, and so on, but I never thought I’d see my own poetry turned
into seat cushions. That’s just a bit too much, isn’t it? (Xia 1991: 114)Although Xia Yu the postmodernist enjoys many forms of non-elite
popular culture, she makes a distinction between serious art and kitsch
masquerading as art. Furthermore, she prefers to maintain control of
her work.^6 The sort of commercialization that is described above also
violates Xia Yu’s sense of privacy; but from a theoretical standpoint,
her response is interesting, given her irreverent attitude as an artist.
Michelle Yeh praises the effectiveness of “the ironic thrust of [the]
metaphor” in this poem, pointing out the tension between the nostal-
gia for lost love and the “cannibalistic act of pickling and eating the
man’s shadow.” She construes the image of the shadow as indicative of
a sense of loss, and she reads pickling as remembrance of a great love:
“pickling implies preservation (she cannot forget him because of her
deep love for him)” (Yeh 1991c: 407). I see pickling more as an act of
torture than of remembrance, and the speaker seems to be remembering
him less for how much she loved him than for how badly he treated
112 Andrea Lingenfelter