1 - The Ambiguity of Affect in Yi Shu's Zhaohua Xishi (Dawn Blossoms Picked Up at Dusk)

Affect encompasses people’s experience of feelings, emotions, and moods through contact that shapes their interpersonal, cultural, and political perception of the self. Affect can sometimes be ambiguous it is changeable and open to multiple meaning. As Susanna Paasonen argues, “Understood as precognitive intensity that moves bodies from one state to another in their encounters with other bodies in the world, affect is ambiguous because it cannot be simply confined to the registers of meaning” (87 – 88). This paper examines the ambiguity of affect depicted in Yi Shu’s (Isabel Nee Yeh-su, b. 1946) novel, Zhaohua Xishi (Dawn Blossoms Picked Up at Dusk) first published in Hong Kong in 1985, with reference to its film adaption under the same title first released in 1986. Through time travel, the female protagonist Luyi, who lives in 2035 accidentally goes back to 1985, meets a young and passionate man Fang Zhongxin. On the one hand, Luyi’s time travel experience inspires her to engage in love with Fang and reconnect with her mother and children. On the other hand, Luyi’s futuristic encounter makes her realize the autocratic control imposed on her and her environment. The analysis of the ambiguous affect in Zhaohua Xishi will illuminate the declining of and yearning for familial and social bond as well as the anxiety of political surveillance in light of advanced technology.