Falling in Love

Book excerpt: Falling in love, with all its accompanying problems, was a subject of obsessive interest among writers and readers in the Ming Dynasty, when society held strictly to arranged marriages. The stories in this engaging collection all deal with this theme in very different ways, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically. They portray young people choosing their own lovers, resorting to ingenious stratagems and risky escapades in defiance of contemporary mores. Chosen to represent the best works from the great age of the vernacular story, they offer an admirable introduction to the world of Chinese fiction in this era. All of the stories in Falling in Love have been translated especially for this volume, and most appear here in translation for the first time. They are taken from two works, Constant Words to Awaken the World (Xing shi heng yan) and a related collection, The Rocks Nod Their Heads (Shi dian tou), both published in the early seventeenth century.