A Sontagian interpretation of Love for Life

1 Introduction

Susan Sontag (1933–2004), a high-profile American critic, essayist, and novelist, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1975. Instead of being beaten by the disease, she turned what she experienced and suffered into Illness as metaphor, a widely read and quoted book published in 1978. Her 1989 work AIDS and its metaphors illustrates her further exploration of the metaphoric mechanism of illness, which is also highlighted in her literary revisit of the AIDS subject in “The Way We Live Now,” a story that appeared in The New Yorker on November 24, 1986. Eleven years apart as they are, the two argumentative works deal with the same subject in the same way because they both study how illness “has been gradually metaphorized and changed into a moral judgment or a political attitude” (Cheng 2018: 1). As to the story “The Way We Live Now,” according to Leslie Luebbers, it “gathers and assembles into a generational portrait the denial and dread that accompanied the phenomenon of an unpredictable and incurable disease” (Luebbers 2009: 174). The “unpredictable and incurable disease” here is AIDS, but even as late as in 2009, Luebbers was so cautious as to not mention it directly due to its bad name. After all, AIDS has been considered closely related to abnormal sexuality since it was discovered in early 1980s.

A 1993 American film, Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, is like a cinematic response to Sontag’s efforts. Philadelphia is one of the first and most popular Hollywood endeavors to include such taboo topics as AIDS, homosexuality, and homophobia, but the Chinese audience had to wait eighteen more years, until 2011, when a film on AIDS, Love for Life (最爱), was released in China. Changwei Gu (顾长卫), a talented and influential Chinese director, led his team to tap into the underworld of AIDS patients. It is an all-star cast, with the Hong Kong superstar Aaron Kwok (郭富城) as the male lead, the recently internationally renowned Chinese movie star Ziyi Zhang (章子怡) as the female lead, and a dozen experienced artists familiar to and welcomed by Chinese audiences as a strong group of supporting roles: Cunxin Pu (濮存昕), Wenli Jiang (蒋雯丽), Zeru Tao (陶泽如), Haiying Sun (孙海英), Guoqing Cai (蔡国庆), Danyang Li (李丹阳), to name just a few. Thanks to the favorable combination of an outstanding director, a team of brilliant actors/actresses, and a controversial topic, Love for Life has become the best-known film that talks about AIDS in China.^[1] No evidence is found that Changwei Gu was encouraged or inspired by Philadelphia or Sontag; however, Sontag’s discussion on AIDS and illness offers a valuable and helpful perspective for us to better understand the film.

2 Plague: a horrible metaphor for the incurable disease

Sontag claims in Illness as metaphor that

illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is toward an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry. (Sontag 1978: 3–4)

But those who are ill have to suffer a double pain, both from the physical illness itself and from the mental ordeal brought by the metaphor of illness, and it is even worse as far as AIDS patients are concerned. Among the metaphors imposed on AIDS, the most harmful is “plague,” which is “the principal metaphor by which the AIDS epidemic is understood” (Sontag 1989: 44).

“Plague” merely as a word does not target any specific person or group of people, and it is usually used to refer to a very infectious disease that causes death and spreads quickly to a large number of people, but just due to this characteristic, “it has become a strongly reproductive and adaptive metaphor that can be conveniently adopted to describe nemesis, disasters, troubles and all that tortures human beings” (Cheng 2018: 127). That AIDS is considered to be a form of plague is inseparable from its infectiousness and epidemicity, whereas the dominant reason lies in its implication that the patients are to blame and their suffering is the punishment they deserve. For instance, in Philadelphia, Andrew Beckett (played by Tom Hanks) admits that although he is going steady with a male partner, he does not stop dating and having sex with strangers he meets in the gay cinema. So to a certain degree it is his own fault that he falls into the trap of AIDS, and what makes it worse is that his lack of sense of responsibility even poses a great threat to his partner, who might also be infected with AIDS. Andrew’s confession therefore pushes him into the disadvantageous position of being despised.

Love for Life says nothing of homosexuality, but the AIDS patients are by no means less disdained by those who are not infected than those in Philadelphia. Or we can say that the AIDS patients are in fact in worse condition in Love for Life. Andrew, though scorned by most people, still has his supporters. What is more important is that his family and lover never give up on or abandon him. Instead, they give him more care and love. In contrast, the AIDS patients in Love for Life seem to be thrown into hell, and there is no way out and no hope of redemption. Old Zhuzhu, father of the male protagonist Deyi Zhao (by Aaron Kwok), is the only character who decides to take care of the infected villagers out of a sense of guilt because he thinks that the disease has been caused by his first son Qiquan Zhao (played by Cunxin Pu), who lures the villagers into illegally selling their blood to blood vendors. He therefore organizes the patients to live together in the deserted village school, while all the other people in the film not only draw a clear line to separate themselves from the patients but also dreadfully malign them. Why? It is the “plague” metaphor that is at work, and even one of the film posters straightforwardly declares that “where there is an outbreak of plague, there is an outburst of desire and love.” What’s more, Old Zhuzhu serves as a spokesman in the film to explain what AIDS is: “It is said that the hot disease [namely AIDS, hot because of the fever the patients usually have] is terminal, a plague that the whole world can do nothing to cure.”

Director Gu’s effort is groundbreaking in China, because “AIDS is a taboo subject in the Chinese filmmaking industry, and the fear of mentioning it is a feeling commonly shared by Chinese people, so the topic has been deliberately avoided and hidden for a long time” (Huang and Zhang 2011: 85). It should be noted that Gu is accused of making too many changes to the original script and adapting the film into a skin-deep love story while the original literary work is of more profundity and has great power to criticize reality. Gu, however, once frankly argued that Love for Life was not meant to be made into a purely literary film. Instead, he also prized the commercial value of the film. Gu’s attitude irritated some critics, and it is no wonder that both love and body in the film were said to “be reduced to glossing over the disconcerting reality and become two magic weapons to attract the audience and satisfy their desire to peek at a secret world” (Lin 2012: 31). In spite of the scathing remarks, the film indeed has aroused more attention with its superstar effect and the promotional events organized around it as a commercial film. With the growing numbers of audiences, the film to some extent helps the director to meet his expectation of broadening the scope of publicity and inviting more people to know something about AIDS. Gu stressed the prejudice and protest against AIDS patients in a 2011 interview, declaring that his purpose in making the film was to “inform the public of the correct measures to control and fight against AIDS, as well as to adhere to the belief that all the infected are innocent and the absolute fear of AIDS should be absolutely eliminated” (cited in Li 2011).

Desperate poverty in Love for Life is the very reason that villagers are infected with AIDS virus. Where the means of existence comes only from the never-sufficient land, the villagers choose to sell their blood. They exchange what their bodies can produce instead of what their labor can do for money. The seemingly quick and easy money can satisfy their instant need or get them out of temporary difficulties, but new demands and problems keep appearing, so they can think of no other solutions but to sell blood again and again. AIDS soon begins to spread rapidly, as the places where their blood is collected are terribly dirty and there is no standard procedure at all for the blood vendors to take their blood. To make a living by selling blood breaks the principle that was once regarded as the law of nature: we should earn a living by working hard.

The temptation of material pleasure is so irresistible that some people sell their blood even when they do not have to. The female protagonist Qinqin Shang (played by Ziyi Zhang), young and newly married, is such an example. She dreams of washing her hair with a bottle of shampoo that is used by the stylish women in the town. After stealthily selling blood just to have her hair look and smell like that of urban girls, she unfortunately joins the AIDS group. In the film, Qinqin’s family-in-law is better off than most families in the village, but even she cannot afford a bottle of shampoo. How about other women in the village? It is evident that women in poverty-stricken rural areas are financially dependent, having no economic status. What will happen to Qinqin when she becomes an AIDS patient? It is not difficult to predict her fate.

Within the metaphoric mechanism of illness, patients suffer not only as a result of the malicious rumors of others but also due to their own guilty feelings, which in turn results in their hesitation to receive medical treatment and in them keeping their illness secret to the outside world, especially in the case of diseases that are as strongly metaphorical as AIDS. What Sontag points out is very similar to Gu’s opinion, that is to say, the metaphoric trappings “inhibit people from seeking treatment early enough, or from making a greater effort to get competent treatment” (Sontag 1989: 14). When Gu was shooting Love for Life, the medical treatment that AIDS patients could get was more optimistic than what Sontag knew when she was writing AIDS and its metaphors. Gu declares:

If the patients are denied any treatment, they can possibly survive only one year since the first attack of the disease, but with the help of the current “cocktail therapy” and appropriate dosage in a scientific way, it is highly possible that they can enjoy the same average life expectancy as healthy people do. Then, AIDS is just a commonly seen chronic disease like diabetes, high blood pressure, and so on. The only difference lies in the deep-rooted prejudice. (cited in Li 2011)

Therefore, it does not make any difference whatever the reasons are behind each patient’s AIDS infection. In Love for Life, the prevailing prejudice against AIDS patients is vividly depicted.

3 Social death: demonization of illness with military metaphors

Sontag is extremely annoyed by the military metaphors applied to illness. She addresses the problem in AIDS and its metaphors and poignantly remarks that “where disease is regularly described as invading the society, and efforts to reduce mortality from a given disease are called a fight, a struggle, a war” (Sontag 1989: 10). Seen with the metaphor, the “owner” of the disease – the patient – naturally falls into the category of the hostile forces that need to be extinguished:

[T]he metaphor implements the way particularly dreaded diseases are envisaged as an alien “other,” as enemies are in modern war; and the move from the demonization of the illness to the attribution of fault to the patient is an inevitable one, no matter if patients are thought of as victims. Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. (Sontag 1989: 11)

It is under this circumstance that AIDS patients have to face a cruel fact that the disease “brings to many a social death that precedes the physical one” (Sontag 1989: 34).

Sontag tries to explain that “abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle” (Sontag 1989: 11), but her charge might not be true because being capitalist or not is not a decisive factor for a society to use military metaphors. The remote village, for example, in Love for Life, gives no glimpse of being a capitalist society, while AIDS is still deemed to be the invasion and attack launched by the evil power outside. In this place, isolated from homosexual culture and modern civilization, the outbreak of AIDS is fiercer than is expected, quickly destroying the weak defense system. If we refer to Philadelphia again, we can find that the subjects and the stories are disparate: Love for Life shows a group of infected villagers whose disease is caused by poverty, and the main story is about love, while Philadelphia focuses on one urban patient whose disease is caused by improper sexual behavior, and the main plot is about law. In this sense, the patients in Love for Life are much more complicated, for they are faced with a double demonization, both from the outside world and from themselves.

To those who are not infected, AIDS patients are no more than the breathing dead, most of whom are reduced to skin and bones covered with festering sores, waiting for their “hard death” (Sontag 1989: 38) and even bringing death to others. So when meeting a patient face to face, the villagers are so scared as if confronted with a horrible ghost that they immediately start to run away or keep a supposedly safe distance. Here AIDS is working in the metaphoric mechanism in which “as a micro-process, it is described as cancer is: an invasion. When the focus is transmission of the disease, an older metaphor, reminiscent of syphilis, is invoked: pollution” (Sontag 1989: 17). There are a lot of scenes in the film that show what AIDS means to the healthy. Frightened by seeing a patient in front of him, a peddler hawking his bean curd runs away as fast as he can; the only shopkeeper in the village accepts cash from the patients with tweezers to avoid direct contact with them when they buy something in the store; a passer-by is scared to death when he suddenly encounters a group of patients gathered together talking with each other. It is a ridiculous scene that when a cigarette pinned behind the passer-by’s ear (a typical way in rural China for people to hold cigarettes given by others) drops down out of extreme fright, Deyi Zhao kindly helps pick it up and wants to return it only to find the passer-by as white as a sheet; Qiquan Zhao takes advantage of his social connections to help his brother Deyi and Deyi’s lover Qinqin get a marriage certificate, but he just throws it at the doorway and does not even bother to knock at the door to inform them; Deyi and Qinqin, now legally married, happily go out to share their wedding candies while their fellow villagers hide behind shut doors.

Old Zhuzhu is the only villager who steps out to give a hand to the patients. He arranges for all the infected in the village to move to live in the primary school, which is vacated because all the teachers fled out of fear (without teachers, children have to go to schools far away, and that deepens the parents’ hostility toward the patients). A short-lived utopia comes into being when the patients live together, leaving behind their families and neighbors, who look down upon them and abandon them.

It is a great pity that although they can for a short while escape external demonization when enclosed in the school, they cannot stop their self-demonization. Qiquan, the first blood vendor in the village, becomes the target of the infected. The anger is first directed at his cat and dog, so the innocent animals are killed by poison. However, that is not enough to put out the flame of revenge. Qiquan’s only son who is just a primary school boy who knows nothing about the adult world becomes the best choice for an unknown villager to carry out their revenge plan. One day on his way to school, the little boy finds a fresh tomato and ends up like the poisoned cat and dog after he eats the tomato. Qiquan is indeed an evil character who tempts the villagers with money to sell their blood to him, yet it is not wrong to say that it is the villagers’ choice whether to follow him or not. The pathetic fact is that the villagers are almost addicted to blood selling. Whenever they are in need of money, the first idea that occurs to them is to sell some blood. They are used to the convenient way of earning money for nothing but blood, turning a blind eye to the risks. But as soon as they do suffer the consequences, they are infuriated and eager to find a scapegoat. It is shocking that they dare not fight against Qiquan, but instead, they turn on weak animals and the innocent boy.

So it is not hard to imagine what the life in the temporary community of AIDS patients would be like. The utopia established by Old Zhuzhu, not unexpectedly, changes into a desperate dystopia where greed and malice in the deep darkness do not lose their power at all. At first there are frequent thefts in the community, and then two patients set a trap to catch Deyi and Qinqin when they are dating (at that time the lovers had not divorced their own spouses), threatening Old Zhuzhu, Deyi’s father with the scandal to hand over his administration of the school with the aim of occupying and selling the public properties. The two patients, not satisfied with what they can get from the school, go so far as to unlawfully fell trees belonging to the whole village and sell them to Qiquan, incredibly and pitifully, for two decent coffins where they can be laid to rest after their death. Their dishonesty and unscrupulousness are woefully padded with their ignorance. They have no idea while they are still alive that they should have been kind to others and should have lived on their own hard work. On the contrary, they are not afraid of doing anything immoral to guarantee a wealthy afterlife. Now that they are aware that they cannot escape and they have already become the walking dead in the uninfected villagers’ eyes, they feel rather comfortable to abandon themselves by breaking the written and unwritten law. Even though confined to a small place, they try by all means to hurt others as long as they feel happy.

4 Doing away with the metaphor of illness

Sontag’s “The Way We Live Now” is said to be inspired by a phone call one night which told her that a close friend of hers was confirmed as having AIDS. She was so sad that “when she hung up the phone, she burst into tears, and later, she could not sleep” (Fries 1995: 256). She started to work on the story that very night and finished it in two days. Nevertheless, she preferred the power of an argumentative essay to that of a simple story. She thus said: “A narrative, it seemed to me, would be less useful than an idea. For narrative pleasure I would appeal to other writers” (Sontag 1989: 13). That may explain her further exploration of the same topic in AIDS and its metaphors, in which she can more frankly and clearly express what she reserves in “The Way We Live Now” for the limits of the genre.

With the marching of times and advancements in medicine, AIDS will eventually be effectively treated. Sontag solemnly declares: “The body is not a battlefield. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy” (Sontag 1989: 95). The patients, therefore, should not only be treated without resentment or prejudice, but also be given more care and kindness. In “The Way We Live Now” Sontag presents a positive and healthy relationship which can be seen as a good example to follow. In the story, a group of friends take good care of an AIDS patient after finding out he is ill. They visit him every day, even vying for his attention. The idea of estrangement or escape from him never comes to them. Meanwhile, they begin to seriously study the disease and related medical treatment. They change their own previously reckless, nothing-to-be-afraid-of lifestyle and become responsible for people and things around them, and “in their mutual friendship and sincere care for each other, they are stronger and more mature when tempered by the fearful disease” (Ke 2013: 15).

Love for Life had gone through many revisions from the title to the content before it finally made its official debut before the audience. The novelist of the original work, also one of the screenwriters for the film, hid his true name and used his penname because of his sensitive identity. Some controversial scenes and sentences being deleted too, the film at last was publicized as a love story. Although the uneasily won love blooms in desperation and withers away with death, the relationship between the two protagonists is sublimated. Different as it is, the love that is born in the miserable world in Love for Life is as warm as that in “The Way We Live Now” and brings changes too. Met with complete resistance from his wife after he gets ill, Deyi pretends to be understanding and generous, urging his wife to get married to someone else if he dies, but prays behind her back that she should never remarry. He is angry that his wife does not visit him, and sullenly marks on the wall how many days she hasn’t stepped into the school. However, upon Qinqin’s arrival, he immediately forgets his wife, doing all he can to seduce the beautiful woman. When their affair comes to light, his first reaction is to shun his responsibility. He hides safely in a room while Qinqin’s husband violently humiliates her and almost beats her to death. After the assault is over, he slowly goes out, smiling to the onlookers just with a brief comment, “What a shame!” His cowardice and meanness cannot be more vividly presented. Nonetheless, it is the same cowardly and selfish man who gradually changes himself when he is approaching his end in the world. After learning that Qinqin has been shut out by both her family-in-law and her own family, he takes the initiative to ask for a divorce, which is long expected by his wife, and then exchanges his own house for a divorce agreement from Qinqin’s husband. The now legally married new couple living together, Deyi safeguards Qinqin and their shabby hut, bravely fighting back against those who come to attack them with verbal abuse and driving away those who harass them. He becomes weaker and weaker physically, but patiently comforts and looks after Qinqin. The AIDS lovers experience a rebirth from pursuing temporary sexual pleasure to sympathizing each other and then to supporting each other. At the end of the film, Qinin, now hopelessly ill, time and time again still struggles to soak herself in the ice cold water taken from a deep well and closely holds Deyi, who is faint with a high fever, to help lower his temperature with her own cold body. When Deyi comes to, he beholds Qinin lying dead near him. He has no intention of living alone without Qinqin, and out of desperate grief he mechanically cuts his own legs with a knife. The film does not show his death directly, but puts an end to the story of love and illness that starts and finishes with blood by taking a still angle to shoot the blood oozing and then flooding from the couple’s house.

5 Conclusion

Love for Life is based on true stories that took place in emerging AIDS villages in China in the 1990s. As a visual presentation of the gloomy life shrouded in the shadow of AIDS, the work, thanks to its popular art form as a film and eye-catching cast, successfully attracts public attention. The fact that it is received with both favorable and unfavorable comments does not mean it is not good enough to the film team. What is meaningful to them is that their efforts prove to be worthwhile as long as people begin to know something about AIDS, take proper measures to protect themselves from being infected, and get along with AIDS patients without fear and discrimination. Among the actors appearing in the film, Wenli Jiang, Cunxin Pu, and Danyang Li are China’s Ambassadors for Prevention of HIV, which helps promote knowledge of AIDS.

Sontag draws on her own experience to write about illness, ruminating as a patient herself and as a friend of patients on the physical and more harmfully mental pains that those who unfortunately fall ill with serious diseases have to suffer. AIDS patients are the same living individuals made of blood and fresh as the uninfected. They certainly have their own emotions of happiness and sadness. Their bodies should not be the target of attack from public discourse, and most importantly, “with this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up” (Sontag 1989: 94). Where Sontag fights with her pen, the team of Love for Life fight with their visual images. Both are brave enough to delve into the taboo subject to reveal the “inconvenient truth” no matter how controversial it is.