Miss Sophie's Diary

Sophie's diary gives Ding Ling a form capable of recording contradictions no Chinese fiction had let a woman character keep in her own voice before: contempt for Weidi's clinging, sincere devotion, which she nonetheless strings along for the entertainment of watching him suffer, sitting right beside an open, specifically physical desire for Ling Jishi's beauty even as she recognizes, clearly and in real time, that he is shallow, vain, and unworthy of the feeling he provokes in her. The diary form lets both truths stand unresolved on the page rather than forcing Sophie to resolve into either the virtuous or the fallen woman Chinese fiction had mostly offered up until then.

Sophie's tuberculosis functions less as tragic Victorian ornament than as the engine of the diary's urgency: isolated in a Beijing boardinghouse, acutely aware of her own failing body, she has little patience left for the social performances expected of her, which is part of why she records her wanting so bluntly. Ding Ling's real innovation is refusing to judge that wanting from outside, the way earlier male-authored May Fourth fiction tended to frame women's desire as either symptom or scandal; Sophie's diary judges nothing but simply reports, which was itself the scandal in 1928.

Sophie's contempt for Weidi is never simply cruelty for its own sake. He offers her a devotion so complete and so undemanding that accepting it would mean accepting a life reduced entirely to being adored, and her repeated cruelty toward him reads, on a close look, as her only available way of refusing a comfortable trap dressed up as love, since the diary form gives her no other outlet, legal or social, for saying no to him outright.

Published in 1928, Miss Sophie's Diary arrived as part of a wave of Chinese women writers, Ding Ling among the most controversial of them, reworking the confessional diary form that male May Fourth writers had already used to dramatize individual consciousness against tradition. Applying that same form to a young woman's frank, often unflattering sexual desire was new enough to unsettle reviewers who had no existing vocabulary for a female narrator reporting her own wanting without either apologizing for it or being narratively punished for having it.