Ying Fenghuang, Professor, Graduate School of Taiwanese Culture, National Taipei University of Education

“The Noodle Lady,” a short story first published in a newspaper literary supplement in 1975, also appeared in writer Di Yi’s first collection. Although the title is short – only three Chinese characters in the original – it reveals the protagonist’s gender and occupation. The Chinese term sao – literally “older brother’s wife” – also lets readers know that she is a married woman.  In the story’s opening scene she is at her noodle-cart, selling bowl after bowl of rice noodles, the customers calling their orders out to “Noodle Lady.” Mother to a ten year-old girl and an eight year-old boy, she is the sole family breadwinner – several years earlier her husband abandoned wife and children for another woman. Noodle Lady reluctantly signed the divorce agreement but failed to receive alimony or child support. Nevertheless, she kept the children, assuming complete responsibility for their upbringing.

At the story’s outset, a taxi-driver takes a romantic interest in Noodle Lady, who since her divorce has devoted herself to her onerous business and family obligations, settling into a dry and cheerless existence. Driver Zhao Fumin, a regular customer at the noodle stand, begins escorting Noodle Lady to movies and she eventually becomes the cabbie’s unofficial “afternoon wife,” or mistress. Zhao impetuously prepares to leave wife and children for his new love, but his wife appears at the noodle stand one day, tearfully voicing her fears. Her children need a father, she says: “Fumin supports us with his taxicab.” Without her husband the family cannot survive. The woman pleads with Noodle Lady, noting that she and her children can get along without a man.

Although she too is a woman, the economically independent Noodle Lady is able to provide for herself and her family, and is therefore comparatively better off than Zhao’s wife. From a feminist perspective, economic autonomy is the foremost criterion for independence. When Noodle Lady recalls the pain of her own husband’s desertion, she inadvertently begins to feel a kind a kinship with Zhao’s wife, sharing her anguish. Hence, she determinedly vows to “break it off with Zhao Fumin,” willingly relinquishing him to his wife.

 “Leave and don’t come back!” Noodle Lady tells Zhao when he stops by the next day. If the story ended here, what readers would see is merely a woman with a conscience, someone who has pulled back from the brink, ending an adulterous relationship and saving a family from breakup. But the story is not over. Several days later, as Noodle Lady and her children return home from an outing, a distraught girl comes looking for her father, Zhao Fumin. As it turns out, Zhao’s five year-old son has been stricken with acute appendicitis and needs an operation immediately. But the boy’s mother has no money, and has sent her daughter to look for Zhao Fumin. Although Noodle Lady is unaware of Zhao’s whereabouts, she takes some money and follows the girl to the hospital. In the emergency room, Noodle Lady glimpses the Zhao family’s dire economic predicament. Knowing how badly they need money, Noodle Lady presses a large sum of cash into Zhao’s wife’s hands and quietly leaves the hospital.

In the first half of the story we see that Noodle Lady doesn’t sink to appropriating another woman’s husband, a moral choice. But her actions in the second half may surprise to readers – after all, she has ended her relationship with Zhao, and Zhao’s wife has been her rival in love. First, Noodle Lady is not well off, earning her money selling rice noodles, a bowl at a time. Second, the boy’s surgery fee was considerable, possibly requiring all of her savings. But Noodle Lady and the Zhao family belong to the same social class, thus she generously opens her purse without any expectation of repayment. This “class consciousness” is even more moving because it transcends romantic love, as well as bonds of ethnicity and gender.

¹A more literal translation of the title (〈米粉嫂〉) would read “Older Brother’s Noodle-selling Spouse.”

Ying Fenghuang, Professor, Graduate School of Taiwanese Culture, National Taipei University of Education

Di Yi (1948) is the penname of Xie Xiulian, a native of Taoyuan. Raised in an impoverished family, the writer has worked as store clerk, laborer, and orphanage caregiver. Throughout her varied employment career she has always maintained an interest in art and literature. In junior high school she particularly enjoyed writing compositions, and when she was seventeen years old her “Newspaper Clippings and Me” was published in the Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News’ “Shin Sheng Supplement.” In 1969 she took up scriptwriting, and was hired as a writer for Taiwan Television’s “Weekly Playhouse,” following which she worked an ad and scriptwriter for seven years. Early in 1975 she published “The Noodle Lady,” a work chosen by China Times editor-in-chief Gao Xinjiang for the column “Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” placing her in the company of other noted authors of the day. 

Weak and sickly as a youth, Di Yi took up Chinese martial arts to improve her health. She also enjoys traditional Chinese music, acupuncture, astrology, fortunetelling, and feng shui, interests that have served as source material for her creative work. In addition to publishing the short-story collections The Noodle Lady (1977), Goodbye Love (1986), and Armory (1995), in 1983 she also began writing martial arts fiction, moving from short stories to novellas to full-length novels, becoming one of the few Taiwanese female writers to work in that genre. In 1993 Wansheng Publishing Company issued A Tale of Two Pearls, a martial arts novel of nearly half a million Chinese characters. In 2000 Storm & Stress Publishing published a series of Di Yi martial arts novels: Have Sword, Will Travel; Legend of the Mirror; A Rake’s Tale, and seven other titles.

The writer came up with the penname “Di Yi” by flipping through a dictionary and relying on intuition, choosing the moniker for its phonetic approximation to the Chinese for “number one.” As an author of martial arts fiction she writes under the penname “Ling Kong Zi.” Di Yi has also published a number of miscellaneous works: Guiguzi’s Traditional Chinese Fitness Regime (1994), and Waiting for Happiness (1997), a collection of columns on numerology that originally appeared in Great News and Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News. Most recently she has published two novels inspired by Buddhist philosophy, Bright Pearl of the Earth (2010) and This Life Is Waiting for You (2012).