1. Introduction
The intellectual emancipatory tide of the New Period impelled literature to break free from entrenched ethical constraints. Writers not only began to directly confront love, marriage, and the spiritual predicaments of women but also formally foregrounded questions of love and marriage, assigning them a position of critical importance. Zhang Jie stands as a representative female writer who was among the first to interrogate the essence of love and marriage. Whether in her expansion of thematic terrain or in the intensity of her artistic expression, she demonstrates formidable artistic achievement, winning readers’ hearts through her candor and courage as a woman. In contrast to her contemporaries, Zhang Jie’s oeuvre consistently focuses on the inner world of women, directly confronting the emotional repression, marital entanglements, and spiritual voicelessness of women under traditional ethical strictures. She breaks through the stereotypical portrayal of female figures in conventional literature and advances the awakening of female subjectivity in contemporary Chinese literature. Zhang Jie’s Love Must Not Be Forgotten genuinely ruptures the forbidden zone surrounding love, inquiring into what constitutes authentic love from the perspectives of its substantive essence and ideal aspiration. A comparison with The Position of Love readily reveals the depth of Zhang Jie’s exploration and the degree of her intellectual courage. Whether in its conception of love or its thematic expansion, while Liu Xinwu’s The Position of Love engages more with revolutionary love on an ideological plane, essentially seeking to delimit love according to traditional and contemporary normative frameworks, Zhang Jie’s Love Must Not Be Forgotten genuinely ruptures.
Love Must Not Be Forgotten represents a significant advance over The Position of Love. Published as a short story in 1979, Love Must Not Be Forgotten is Zhang Jie’s most representative early social-problem novel and a canonical text of the New Period literary scene that dared, at an early stage, to explore the relationship between love and marriage and to challenge conventional notions of courtship and matrimony. “An unassuming short story entitled Love Must Not Be Forgotten unexpectedly became a historical allegory for an era of moral discursive transformation.” (Rao, 2022)
Love Must Not Be Forgotten bears distinct autobiographical coloration. The novel takes as its narrative mainline the marital and romantic experiences of two generations of women—mother and daughter. Through the daughter Shanshan’s contemporary confusions regarding love and marriage, it retrospectively traces the restrained, pure, yet lifelong-regretted spiritual love of her mother, Zhong Yu, profoundly revealing, against the specific backdrop of a particular historical era, the spiritual shackles of loveless marriage and the inestimable preciousness of genuine love. Unlike traditional fiction on the theme of love and marriage, which tends to focus on family ethics and the realities of daily life, Zhang Jie composed this work at a time when the very word “love” remained a forbidden zone, when the garden of love lay barren—and it was against this backdrop that she embarked on her exploration, boldly advancing the view that marriage must be grounded in sincere love. Departing from the utilitarian criteria of worldly judgments on love and marriage, Zhang Jie disarticulates marriage from love and boldly propounds the core thesis that “only a marriage based on love possesses moral value,” while offering a trenchant critique of women’s personal dependency and emotional suppression under the traditional, private-property-based model of love and marriage. This avant-garde literary expression, upon publication, immediately sparked enormous social controversy. Hong Zicheng observes: “This sentimental novel, which employs a dual first-person narrative to augment its capacity for confiding, was among the earliest works of the ‘New Period’ to address the contradictions between love and marriage, provoking at the time considerable debate over marital ethics.” (Hong, 2010) This definitively shattered the creative impasse in which the literary world of the time had avoided themes of love and passion, propelling New Period literature toward a breakthrough in the representation of human nature.
For an extended period, scholarly research on Love Must Not Be Forgotten has largely concentrated on interpretations of its views on love and marriage, analyses of female consciousness, and assessments of its historical value, yielding fruitful results. However, much of this scholarship has overlooked the profound influence of Russian and Soviet literature on Zhang Jie’s creative methods, and the examination of the text’s artistic borrowings and innovations remains relatively weak. In light of this, the present study, grounded in close textual reading and socio-historical research methodology, and drawing upon Zhang Jie’s personal life experience and the nourishing influence of Russian and Soviet literary creation, analyzes the repressed representation of love in the text, excavates the novel’s deep call for pure love, and elucidates its distinctive intellectual and artistic value within the developmental trajectory of New Period women’s literature.
2. The Spiritual Resources of Zhang Jie’s Creation
Zhang Jie is a preeminent female writer of the New Period literary scene, particularly in the context of women’s writing since the 1980s, where she may be regarded as a literary leading figure. From the vantage point of her standing in the literary world, her illumination and advocacy of women’s literature, along with her exploration and elevation of female consciousness, have blazed a trail into the inner world of educated women. The stories she tells—of women, of life, of love—continue to resonate in our sensibilities and provoke manifold reflections on this vast and varied world. Zhang Jie once stated, “Writing is a form of existence for my life.” (Zhang, 2011) This statement serves as both her literary manifesto and a reflection of her creative existence. Her deep devotion to literature meant that she never relinquished her aspiration to write and to engage with the world through it. In 1978, she rose to fame with her debut work, The Child from the Forest, and thereafter became a professional writer. She is the only writer in contemporary Chinese literature to have won the Mao Dun Literature Prize twice; her works have attracted considerable attention both domestically and internationally and have been translated into multiple languages. Following the publication of Love Must Not Be Forgotten, “during the course of the debates, some researchers persistently compared this short story with Zhang Jie’s own life, seeking clues and threads of connection. Although it can sometimes be a thankless task to simply draw parallels and associations between the stories in literary works and the author’s real life, tracing the sources of an author’s creation and investigating the various entanglements and interactions with her real-life circumstances often yields unexpected effects in the interpretation of literary works.” (Xie, 2021)
As a woman, Zhang Jie’s distinctive female consciousness, and the life experiences—particularly the painful vicissitudes of love and marriage—that she encountered, constitute a significant factor in the life-quality of her literary oeuvre. Particular attention should be paid to Zhang Jie’s inner temperament, emotional experience, and personal sentiments and social views. Zhang Jie was once a resilient yet lonely woman, unwilling to succumb to the hardships of life and possessed of her own aspirations for a better existence; yet her life was remarkably tortuous and fraught with difficulties. She spent her childhood in impoverished and backward rural areas.
Her mother, Zhang Zhishan, was an ordinary, uneducated woman, abandoned early by her husband. She raised Zhang Jie through grueling labor—working in factories, washing clothes, and serving as a domestic helper—enduring a life of manifold misfortunes. For many years, Zhang Jie and her mother lived a wandering, unsettled existence, which instilled in Zhang Jie a premature loneliness, an early-formed cognition of the world, and an introverted and aloof temperament. With no playmates, she often wandered alone, lingering in nature and forests, which stimulated her imagination and gave rise to many fantasies about life. She aspired early to become a poet and writer, but the harshness of reality repeatedly dealt her heavy blows. As she struggled to make a living, the fate of the mother—marked by marital misfortune—was, as it turned out, inherited by the daughter. After graduating from Renmin University of China, Zhang Jie was assigned to work at the First Ministry of Machinery Industry of the State, where she met her first husband, Sun Youyu, who was the executive vice minister of the ministry. However, upon marriage, she found life extremely unhappy and eventually divorced. Her second marriage also ended in divorce. These two unsatisfactory marriages left an indelible shadow on Zhang Jie’s psyche. She resolutely chose to raise her daughter alone, repeating the same pattern of life as her mother, while also having to confront the prejudices and pressures of conventional society. This further intensified her introversion and deepened her philosophical contemplation. In 1991, her mother died of a thrombosis, plunging Zhang Jie into profound grief. She felt that her mother’s departure had cast an endless darkness over her entire world, shattering everything in an instant. Overcome with extreme sorrow, Zhang Jie fell seriously ill. Subsequently, with deeply felt and delicate prose, she wrote the long autobiographical essay The Person Who Loved Me Most in the World Is Gone. This work can be regarded as an unforgettable long-form narrative, depicting the minutiae of her life with her mother. Through her writing, Zhang Jie conveys life itself, the soul, and profound love. Without her mother, there would have been no later Zhang Jie, famous and award-winning years later. This lived experience and emotional temperament deeply permeate her works. Of course, the spiritual resources of Zhang Jie’s creation are also inseparable from the influence and shaping of the mainstream social and historical discourse of her time. As a writer with a sense of mission, the social responsibilities, artistic imperatives, and critical reflections on reality that Zhang Jie bore made it impossible for her to exist apart from her era. A female writer who keenly experienced life, the times, society, and especially the fate of women as a whole, she infused her works with the insights derived from her unique reflections.
Love occupies a position of central importance in Zhang Jie’s oeuvre. In Love Must Not Be Forgotten, published in 1979, she boldly summons love. The story opens with the daughter Shanshan, at the age of thirty, receiving a proposal from the handsome Qiao Lin. Qiao Lin is unexceptionable in every respect, yet when Shanshan asks him why he loves her or poses other significant questions, he hesitates and prevaricates, unable to offer a concrete answer, failing to provide Shanshan with emotional reassurance. This makes Shanshan shrink from and hesitate over the prospect of marrying him. At this juncture, Shanshan seeks someone to help her resolve this dilemma, and so she turns to her deceased mother, Zhong Yu, thereby initiating the unfolding of her mother’s emotional story from years past. Love Must Not Be Forgotten, on the surface, appears to be about love, yet it is in fact a social-problem novel. When speaking of her motivation for writing Love Must Not Be Forgotten, Zhang Jie once said: “With this short story, I wanted to express, through literary form, my understanding of Engels’s work—The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.” (Sun, 1991) Taking this as the creative kernel, Zhang Jie shapes Zhong Yu’s unhappy marriage: she entered into marriage hastily on the basis of physical appearance, with her husband sharing no spiritual resonance with her; This unhappy, spiritually hollow union serves as this loveless marriage serves as a microcosm of the old-style, private-property-based model of love and marriage. Both mother and daughter reject unions lacking spiritual affinity, which constitutes a literary expression of Engels’s views on love and marriage. Engels advocates gender equality and women’s emotional freedom. The novel, through the mother’s admonition to Shanshan—“If you are not certain about what you truly want, I think it would be better for you to live a single life than to marry in a muddle-headed way!” (Zhang, 1984)—breaks with the conventional dictate that one must marry. The work calls upon women to cast off the fetters of public opinion and obsolete morality, to actively pursue love characterized by mutual spiritual resonance, thereby realizing, in the literary practice of the New Period, Engels’s ideals of gender equality and freedom in love and marriage. During her university years, Zhang Jie took elective courses in economics and gained a considerable understanding of the works of Marx and Engels; her extensive reading made her a thorough Marxist at an early age. To a certain extent, therefore, while Love Must Not Be Forgotten appears superficially to be about “love”, its substance is Zhang Jie’s philosophical reflection on social conditions and the existential state of human beings.
3. The Concept of Love in Love Must Not Be Forgotten
In Love Must Not Be Forgotten, Zhang Jie, through a highly personalized mode of writing, artistically reconfigures her own and her mother’s real-life encounters, marital difficulties, and emotional regrets, accomplishing, through literary narration, a retrospective and re-evaluation of the fates of two generations of women. The novel takes the daughter Shanshan’s contemporary confusions about love and marriage as its narrative entry point, and ingeniously constructs a bridge of dialogue between past and present, allowing the views on love and marriage of the two generations of women to form a sharp contrast. Through nuanced linguistic narration and authentic emotional depiction, it dismantles the utilitarian exterior of worldly love and marriage and probes the most genuine core of love and marriage. The thirty-year-old Shanshan, facing the physically attractive, well-qualified suitor Qiao Lin, remains perpetually hesitant and reluctant to enter marriage. This perplexity and ambivalence are not groundless affectation but derive from the profound caution inspired by her mother Zhong Yu’s lifelong emotional tragedy. By worldly standards, Qiao Lin is handsome, upright, and exceptionally well-qualified—an irreproachable ideal match. Yet once the conversation touches on deeper topics such as the essence of love, spiritual affinity, and life aspirations, Qiao Lin proves linguistically impoverished and intellectually vacuous, unable to offer Shanshan spiritual resonance or emotional solace. It is precisely this stark contrast between surface completeness and inner emptiness that impels Shanshan to retrospectively trace her mother’s life experience, seeking from her mother’s tragedy an answer to her own marital choice.
Through fragmentary and detailed narration, Zhang Jie gradually builds a portrait of Zhong Yu’s profound yet restrained love, rendering the suppressed depth of feeling vividly on the page. In daily life, Zhong Yu is perpetually concerned for the health of the elderly cadre; upon hearing him cough slightly, her heart twists in anguish and worry—such minute and attentive solicitude is the truest manifestation of ultimate devotion. To uphold this pure love, Zhong Yu resolutely rejects all suitors, never remarries, and steadfastly guards this love known to none. Against the specific backdrop of the times, when the elderly cadre suffers injustice and finds himself in dire straits, even though he himself is in peril and his fate precarious, Zhong Yu remains unwavering in her care and concern. When the elderly cadre passes away, Zhong Yu’s world collapses utterly; inconsolable grief turns her hair white and breaks her spirit and ravages her body. Even at the risk of being denounced and persecuted, she insists on wearing a black armband in mourning, stubbornly upholding her devotion. The longing that has no place to settle is ultimately poured into the notebooks she carries with her. Over decades, Zhong Yu persists in recording her daily life and pouring out her longing in words, day after day engaging in a dialogue across the void with her departed beloved, sharing the trivialities of daily life, confiding her grievances, and raging against the injustice he suffered. The deeply affecting monologue in the text—“How I wish I could bear that inhuman torment in your place; you should have lived on, to see the day of your vindication, to work once more for this society, for all those who loved you—you should have lived!” (Ibid), is a heart-wrenching testament to Zhong Yu’s unforgettable love and profound empathy. She is not merely immersed in romantic feeling; she also identifies with her beloved’s ideals and aspirations, resolving to live well and contribute to society in accordance with his convictions, thereby elevating this love beyond worldly passion to a noble spiritual value. This love, mutual yet ultimately unfulfilled, embodies both profound devotion and restraint on both sides. The novel’s language delicately captures the elderly cadre’s hidden affection, thereby breaking through the thin narrative of unrequited love and rendering the emotion more genuine and moving.
In the intervals of his busy work, he would always gaze at Zhong Yu’s figure through the carriage window, concerned for her safety when she traveled; he often lingered near her residence, simply to feel her presence from nearby; he read Zhong Yu’s works attentively, offered precise critique and silent support, understanding her talent and recognizing her original aspirations. The text records the look in his eyes when he saw her: “Especially his eyes, very cold and gleaming with a chill light...for such cold eyes to be filled with tenderness, it must require an extraordinarily powerful love, and that love must be for a woman truly worthy of it.” (Ibid) This detailed delineation precisely underscores the uniqueness of this love; such ultimate tenderness and partiality can only be engendered by sincere and profound love, proving that the two are soulmates, mutually attuned and reciprocally devoted. Moreover, their shared passion for the oboe serves as the best testament to their spiritual consonance and mutual understanding, lending this love, which spanned half a lifetime, greater plausibility and emotional power. Constrained, however, by the ethical norms of the time, worldly conventions, and the bonds of existing marriages, these two deeply loving and highly compatible individuals can ultimately only exercise restraint, gaze at each other from afar, and never summon the courage to fight for their own love. They can only bury their devotion deep in their hearts, commit it to words, and allow it to dissolve into the passage of time, ultimately meeting with lifelong regret.
With plain yet delicate, restrained yet deeply affecting narrative language, Zhang Jie transforms personal life experience into a reflection on love and marriage of universal significance. Through the tragic love of Zhong Yu and the elderly cadre, she offers a profound interpretation of the essence of love. The Bulgarian novelist Vasilev once proposed that love is an organic synthesis of human natural essence and social essence, a comprehensive life-form encompassing physiological, psychological, material, and conscious dimensions, and represents the purest and deepest emotional experience of humanity. Vasilev holds that: “Love connects the natural essence and the social essence of human beings; it is a complex of biological and social relations, of physiological and psychological factors, a multifaceted, profound, and vital dialectical unity of matter and consciousness.” (Vasilev, 1984) What Love Must Not Be Forgotten portrays is precisely such a pure love, transcending physical appearance, fame and fortune, and worldly rules. Through the marital choices and destinies of two generations of women and their juxtaposition, Zhang Jie critiques the hypocrisy and cruelty of loveless marriage, affirms the value of love characterized by spiritual affinity and soulful resonance, and, through authentic emotional narrative and nuanced psychological portrayal, accomplishes a reflection on and rebellion against worldly conceptions of love and marriage, while also vividly illustrating the indelible and steadfast power of true love.
4. The Literary Significance of Love Must Not Be Forgotten
The rise of women’s literature was first and foremost an effect of the torrent of the intellectual emancipation movement, which gave impetus to women’s pursuit of a unity between human self-consciousness and female self-consciousness. In the 1980s, female writers such as Zhang Jie, Zong Pu, Wang Anyi, Tie Ning, Zhang Kangkang, Dai Houying, and Can Xue represented the new frontiers of women’s writing. This expansion demonstrates that women’s engagement with the world is a form of dual engagement—that is, possession of both the external world and the internal world of women themselves. This not only broke through the narrow confines of women writers writing only about themselves but also avoided the one-sidedness of focusing solely on external life while neglecting the inner self. Love occupies a central place in Zhang Jie’s creation. In Love Must Not Be Forgotten, published in 1979, she boldly summons love. Although the novel exhibits certain deficiencies in artistic expression, its literary value is not to be overlooked. Zhang Jie’s call for love-based marriage and her exploration of the essence of marriage in this novel provoked considerable controversy. In Hong Zicheng’s view, “this sentimental novel, which employs a dual first-person narrative to augment its capacity for confiding, was among the earliest works of the ‘New Period’ to address the contradictions between love and marriage, provoking at the time considerable debate over marital ethics.” (Hong, 2010)
At the time, the sensitive word “love” was almost unspeakable; yet Zhang Jie, overcoming numerous obstacles, summoned the courage to write this novel, encouraging readers that if they were in love, they should boldly pursue it, and cautioning them not to be swayed by outdated consciousness inherited from the past or by the opinions of others. If one has not encountered love, it is better to wait; waiting for the arrival of love is far better than marrying in a muddled fashion. Zhang Jie attached great importance to spiritual affinity in marriage, admonishing that only a marriage based on love is morally legitimate; if there is no love, then a lifetime without marriage is entirely unproblematic. However, this led many earlier researchers to limit their interpretations of the novel to “marital ethics”, thereby neglecting the influence of Russian and Soviet literature—especially Chekhov—on Zhang Jie’s creative style and thematic concerns. Zhang Jie transforms Chekhov’s restrained narration into a minute observation of everyday life, while integrating the existential anxiety of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia with the sense of responsibility and mission of Chinese intellectuals. (Yu & Sun, 2025) In terms of cross-cultural literary borrowing and artistic innovation, Zhang Jie, in Love Must Not Be Forgotten, fully inherits Chekhov’s artistic technique of using restrained narration to downplay dramatic conflict in love, thereby highlighting the spiritual emptiness of worldly love and marriage. Throughout the text, there is no vehement emotional indictment or overt sentimental melodrama; the decades of profound devotion between Zhong Yu and the elderly cadre, and the tragedy of their love that could not be realized, are all quietly revealed through fragmentary details such as chance encounters, treasured books, and private diaries, rendering the emotional expression introverted, deep, restrained, and subdued. This shared restraint in narration allows both works to break free from the florid conventions of popular romantic narrative, depicting profound tragedy with a calm and measured pen. In Love Must Not Be Forgotten, the very word “Chekhov” appears, and The Selected Stories of Chekhov serves as the “love token” between mother Zhong Yu and the male comrade she loves, a source of spiritual solace for the two lovers in those bitter years. Zhang Jie’s choice of The Selected Stories of Chekhov is deliberate. In real life, Zhang Jie herself owned this set of books and held a special affection for Chekhov. Liu Xicheng once wrote in his work: “I also had contact with Zhang Jie, and was even familiar with her ... I once visited her home in Erligou. When I saw the furnishings in her home, the set of twenty volumes of Chekhov’s stories translated by Ru Long on her bookshelf, and the large portrait of Chekhov hanging on the wall, how consistent it all was with the scene and atmosphere described in the novel!” (Liu, 2004) Zhang Jie’s Love Must Not Be Forgotten was inspired by Chekhov’s short story A Woman Without Prejudice: A Love Story. In Chekhov’s story, Yelena’s suitor Saliutov is tall, broad-shouldered, powerful, and imposing, yet when it comes to love, this Hercules-like figure becomes hesitant and timid; Chekhov uses his powerful physique to highlight his timidity in expressing love. In Love Must Not Be Forgotten, Zhang Jie portrays Shanshan’s suitor Qiao Lin as dark-complexioned, with rough-hewn features and a physique reminiscent of the “Discobolus” by the Greek sculptor Myron, yet whenever Shanshan seeks his opinion on significant matters or asks him to express his views on love, he can utter little beyond “good” or “not good”, remaining tongue-tied for a long time. Zhang Jie thus creates a striking contrast between the male’s physical prowess and his “severe impediment” in verbal communication. From this, we can discern Zhang Jie’s appropriation of Chekhov’s narrative techniques in her own fictional practice. It is worth noting, however, that Zhang Jie does not merely copy Chekhov. Although she borrows the device of contrasting body and soul, and although both stories address the contradictions between love and marriage, Zhang Jie’s creative purpose differs markedly from Chekhov’s. Zhang Jie seeks to inscribe a “great love” through the spiritual trauma inflicted by prior marital experience. In her view, a merely perfect physique and a formal marriage can bring no positive change to a woman’s life; on the contrary, they become obstacles on her life path. A loveless marriage is an imposition of spiritual shackles, inflicting upon women profound anguish and loneliness. Zhang Jie repeatedly emphasizes that women are no longer the “Other”, no longer appendages subject to male domination, but independent individuals possessed of life-consciousness and their own thoughts; they have the right to actively strive for their own love and marriage. She encourages women to resist social opinion and convention and to insist on free love. Love Must Not Be Forgotten is not merely a call for love but also a call for individual spiritual freedom. Zhang Jie’s dual concern—for the vast external world and for women’s inner selves—reflects the stubbornness of the female world while simultaneously revealing social phenomena. In her depictions of social life and reform, she embeds contemplative reflections and maxims on women’s liberation, capturing the character of a great epoch. On the whole, Zhang Jie’s women’s writing assumes a socially engaged creative posture, emphasizing women’s spiritual enlightenment and the theme of anti-feudalism. Often departing from the narrow sphere of personal joys and sorrows, she undertakes, against the backdrop of social transformation, the responsibility of reflecting on social reality and historical pathways; her examination of female selfhood is typically subsumed within this broader social framework.
5. Conclusion
“As Yang Tiantian notes, ‘Although Zhang Jie repeatedly suffered setbacks in her efforts to transcend the self and to transcend gender, even falling into confusion on several occasions, she has steadfastly advanced along her own chosen creative path. Through her distinctive perspective on society, her delicate delineation of characters’ inner worlds as a female writer, and especially her reflections on women’s liberation and her corresponding literary practice, she has added a remarkably brilliant landscape to the women’s literature of the New Period. Her works, on the one hand, express a concern for social reform, and on the other, as a female writer, she repeatedly extends her profound and delicate pen into the world of women, depicting its bittersweet vicissitudes and exploring its spiritual joys and sorrows. Through her works, Zhang Jie has accomplished a vivid outlining of women’s fate, and by dismantling traditional myths of femininity and subverting the phallocentric order, she has revealed the complete spiritual journey toward independence and liberation for contemporary Chinese women.” (Yang, 2024)
This study, taking Zhang Jie’s Love Must Not Be Forgotten as its object of investigation and integrating the historical context of intellectual emancipation in the New Period, the author’s personal life experience, Engels’s theory of love and marriage, and the creative influence of Russian and Soviet literature, analyzes, from multiple dimensions—textual content, character portrayal, artistic technique, and intellectual value—the work’s profound call for pure love and ideal marriage. As a landmark work of New Period literature in 1979, this novel broke through the creative limitations, which had evaded the theme of love and adhered to traditional ethics. It was among the first to breach the forbidden zone of writing on love and marriage, incorporating into literary narrative the moral essence of marriage, women’s emotional freedom, and spiritual awakening. In the developmental process of contemporary women’s literature, it holds an irreplaceable pioneering significance.