Pain, the symbol of life
Wintry Night revolves around the experiences of a Hakka family farming in the wilderness, describing the dangers and difficulties they experience working the land near an Aboriginal village. As essential as the land is to life, it is also the source of painful conflicts. The trilogy's Little Sister Teng (who was given to another family to raise as their future daughter-in-law) has finally, after much difficulty, acquired a home of her own. One night before bed, she boils a pot of water to warm her feet:
"She focused on rubbing away the dirt. It was strange... you could never wipe all of it off; there was always more.... If she kept rubbing, perhaps her whole body would become filth and be entirely scrubbed away.... Was this life? Life came from the soil, but wasn't itself earth, except that, in the end, it was still earth. It wasn't dirt, so you could move and act freely even though it was lonely. Yet it was dirt, so it was low and base, but also so very stable, real and serene."
The second book in the trilogy, The Desolate Village, follows Taiwan's anti-Japanese movement from military resistance to its later non-violent stage, using this as a backdrop against which he sets the coming together of farming families into the Farmers' Movement. Little Sister Teng has married Liu Ah-han, a onetime guardsman for the Japanese who now leads the resistance against the colonial government and its corrupt local collaborators. Liu is arrested, jailed and tortured for his efforts. Left to raise her family on her own, Little Sister Teng eventually puts aside her sorrow and seeks solace in Buddhism. Lee, who was an avid student of Buddhism at the time he was writing the novel, granted Little Sister Teng peace at twilight:
"In spring, the gold of the sunset was tinted with green. Summer days were a bright white, bordered with pale yellow. Autumn was a burnt gold shade, while winter was a simple, earthy yellow...."
In The Lonely Lantern, Lee writes of the havoc and displacements Taiwanese experienced as a result of the war in the South Pacific: young people died in distant locales while Taiwan's land and people were pillaged. A much older Little Sister Teng is able to survive because she has remained close to the land. As she guides her family through difficult times, she becomes the heart and soul of Fantzulin. Marching across the deadly battlefields of the Philippines, young men recall their hometown and their "grandmother," finding in these thoughts a moment's respite from the horror of their surroundings. By cultivating and caring for her little plot of land, Little Sister Teng is, in effect, keeping lit a "lonely lantern" that will help lead them home again.
"In my fiction, I always stress that 'movement' is the distinguishing characteristic of life," Lee explains. "And movement denotes suffering. So pain and suffering represent life; suffering is what it means to be human. When do you stop suffering? The end of movement, the end of suffering, is death."
In The Lonely Lantern, Lin Min-chu, a 17-year-old Taiwanese youth conscripted and trained as a kamikaze pilot, gives voice to this epiphany as he prepares to die for the Japanese emperor:
"It's very simple. This, right now, is 'life.' Climbing into the plane and making your run, that's 'death.' That's all there is to it."
In the a postscript to The Lonely Lantern, Lee referenced his study of the historical record and his fieldwork: "These extraordinary scenes [of soldiers] cooking their comrades' arms, cutting the flesh from their bones, orienting themselves towards their hometowns to meditate.... Such things are beyond the imagining of an author. Let me testify to the truth of a literary principle: All works must be drawn from life. The only way to create a truly literary work is to be truly faithful to life."
A Buddhist for most of his life, Lee converted to Christianity at the age of 60 after experiencing an epiphany on humanity's limitations. Interestingly, the epiphany occurred while he was working on a retelling of the legend of Lady White Snake that drew heavily on Buddhist themes.