I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KISS “God of Thunder” (country version from MTV Unplugged) (1996).

In my post about Kiss Unplugged, I mentioned that there are videos online of the entire uncut show.  There’s also a video of this–a country version of “God of Thunder”

Three things: One, it’s weird how hokey Gene gets at the end–for a demon he’s quite goofy.  And two, it’s amazing how good this song sounds when turned into a country song.  On the Kiss covers album Kiss My Ass, I was surprised how much I liked Garth Brook’s rendition of “Hard Luck Woman and now I see that maybe all great Kiss songs are just country songs at heart.  And three, it absolutely does not sound like Gene singing–he does an impressive falsetto.

[READ: September 18, 2013] “Victory”

This is a simple story of infidelity.  The fact that the characters have such similar names bothered me a bit, but it wasn’t terribly confusing.  Lin Hong (the woman) finds a key which her husband Li Hanlin has secreted away in a drawer.  He is away on business, and she tries to figure out what the key is for.  Eventually she realizes it is for a drawer at his office.  I actually would have preferred that the story was mostly about the searching, which I think would have been more interesting.

When she opens the drawer she finds evidence of his infidelity—photo and letters from a woman named Qingqing.  One of the letters includes a phone number.  So she calls it.  She tells Qingqing to leave her husband alone and that she has ruined their marriage.  But Qingqing says that they wouldn’t have gone any further anyway and that she’s not really interested in Lin.

Li calls some of his friends but they deny any awareness of an affair.  Finally, she calls one of her fiends to complain and the friend gives some advice about how she should behave when Lin gets back.

The remainder of the story is about Lin’s return and how Li takes her friend’s advice.  Li’s plan is to simply not talk to him—to shun him until he crawls back.  But he doesn’t do that.  He doesn’t even apologize.  He says that he and Quinqing talked and were friends and even kissed but they would never have done anything else.  He says he’ll call it off with her but he never apologizes.  This enrages Li.

The bulk of the story is the way the two of them resist speaking to each other—each one trying to “win” this stalemate.

It goes on for some 26 days at which time they both decide that it is ridiculous and they must choose to either stay together or get divorced.  Lin doesn’t want the divorce, so of course, Li says they should get one–just to spite him.  At the very end of the story Li has a small victory, but really at what cost.

I did like the story, because of the intense descriptions of their actions, but it wasn’t very enjoyable.  And ultimately I can’t decide if the author felt the whole proceedings were as pointless and foolish as I did or if she felt there was indeed a victory.  This story was translated from the Chinese by Allan Barr.