ABSTRACT
Unlike most authors of the essays in the book, I am not a film critic, nor a specialist in modern Chinese fiction. I write as a common reader and viewer without much reliance on critical theories. There should be a place for such a view simply because, like all works of art, both Chang’s fiction and Lee’s film are primarily created for people like you and me, common readers and moviegoers. As Virginia Woolf remarks, an ideal common reader is one who has “a vision, such as we get in a good novel where everything contributes to bring the writer’s conception as a whole before us” (Woolf, 1953, p. 218).
