ABSTRACT
“A Gentleman’s Love” is a short-short story published in Chinese by Wang Kuishan in 2012. This chapter starts by presenting three types of responses to the story to show how “impasses of non-communication” occur in this particular case and, more generally, why issues essential to the culture of the original text are neglected, ignored, or dismissed by readers of a different cultural tradition. The analysis focuses on the unity of the story’s formal ambiguity and its unsettled/unsettling content and argues for a more appropriate understanding of the story grounded in the main character’s idea/ideal of a Confucian gentleman. In addition to disciplinary methods, this essay engages a distinct ethnographic perspective with firsthand observation of, and face-to-face interviews with, the author as important references. By resorting to the Confucian tradition for solutions to the impasses, this essay seeks to facilitate understanding with Chinese conceptual models and the paradigms of thinking that arose from Chinese experiences.
