pickOf the four of Shen Fu's records which have passed down to us, the first three recount his life with his adorable wife Yün, whose sweet nature was subject to anxiety & depression, sensitive to the harsh judgements of her in-laws, & prone to ill health, which we know from early on will sunder the loving couple. Shen's grief at her death is palpable & moving.
The couple live an aesthetic life, troubled by precarious employment, poverty and... 1/4⬇️
"She prized shabby old books and tattered paintings. She would take the partial remnants of old books and separate them into sections by topic, and then have them rebound. These she called her 'Fragments of Literature'. When she found some calligraphy or a painting that had been ruined, she felt she had to search for a piece of old paper on which to remount it. If there were portions missing, she would ask me to restore them. These she named ⬇️
"I was born in the winter of the 27th year of the reign of the Emperor Chien Lung, on the second and twentieth day of the eleventh month."
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
Written around 1809 by a mid-level Ch'ing Dynasty civil servant, the surviving four records (nonetheless confusingly still titled "Six Records") recount Fu's marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Yün, his dalliances with courtesans and her efforts to secure him a concubine, in keeping with the social mores of the time.
In a culture of arranged marriages, the introduction says that Fu's description of his romantic love match with Yün was unusual ⬇️
Belated Weekly Report:
There finally was a nice day with morning sunshine for my picture 😊
I have read the amusing meta-fictional The Age of Goodbyes and finally! finished #Clarissa 🎇🎆🎉
So, of course, I have started another 18th C epistolary novel, Julie or the New Eloise 😳🙄 For something completely different (that I can carry on the subway), I am also reading the tagged book.
This memoir from eighteenth-century China is wonderfully positive.
#China #memoirs #nonfiction
Six Records of a Floating Life | 
Several of the blurbs I read make much of Yün's search for a concubine for Shen, but this takes up only a small part of the account and is, I assume, a prurient sales-pitch as, again, it's done rather sweetly and was culturally appropriate, and not mentioned was Yün's own interest in having a same-sex relationship within the domestic home. Also not ⬇️ 6mo
The last record is a travel memoir and, while interesting on its own account, lacks much of the intimate nature of the preceding sections, not least because Yün is largely absent and Shen attention is more on ⬇️ 6mo
Overall, 4½⭐ (Apologies; this review ran on longer than I'd intended! ⏳😴) 6mo