HONG YING HAS been suffering from insomnia. Based in London since 1990, the 40-year-old writer keeps fretting and banging out e-mails to potentially useful sources. One arrived from Hong in my in-box on December 3, announcing: 'I have just received the news - very shocking and I was not mentally prepared,' and ending with a plea: 'I hope that you could help me in any manner you deem appropriate.'
Hong says she was 'very moved' when I replied to her immediately. Mildly refreshed by a siesta, she hovers on a white sofa as her green tea goes cold and darkness gathers.
Opposite is her husband, Henry Zhao, a Chinese literature scholar who lectures at London's School of Oriental and African Studies. He looks dazed and depressed; his hair is plastered against his forehead and his eyes are misty.
The couple have lost the libel case that had dragged on in China since June, over Hong's novel, K: The Art Of Love. The novel recounts the affair between a young female novelist dubbed 'K' and Virginia Woolf's nephew, the English artist Julian Bell, while he was teaching English in 1930s China.
The cause of the lawsuit was Hong's portrayal of the heroine whom, experts agree, is clearly identifiable as the late Chinese short-story writer Ling Shuhua. Furious about 'unbearably pornographic descriptions', Ling's London-based daughter, Chen Xiaoying, sued Hong. The atmosphere in court on June 24, when Hong gave her testimony, was frosty to say the least. 'We were face to face but we didn't say a word,' Hong says.
Earlier this month, in the final court ruling at the northeastern town of Changchun, where the case was tried because the book had been serialised in a local journal Zuojia, Hong was found guilty of eroticism and defamation of the dead. She was sentenced to pay a penalty of 100,000 yuan (HK$94,240) plus the same again in costs. The court also banned the book indefinitely in China and ordered Hong to make a public apology in a national newspaper. Hong claims she was astonished when she heard the verdict, which she says is 'unfair' and 'ungrounded'.
Zhao says Chen Xiaoying must have an Electra complex (when a woman loves her father and hates her mother) because she claimed the novel implies her father was impotent. Zhao adds there was 'not a hint of impotence - the whole thing is about the Taoist art of love and how it wasn't accepted then'. The book contains much risque material, including fellatio, sadism and a menage a trois.