裘利安在房子里找闵送他的那条黄缎子手帕，他在找那K字。可就是没有。找得狂躁起来，找累了，坐在楼梯口上。
决定不找了，什么事都得归于自然而然，万事不可强求，又是道教思想。他苦笑，这么说来，不找，他就会在不可知的一天，与之不期而遇。
一早裘利安让仆人们出去买菜，他盼望门在八点后被一只纤细好看的手打开。八点一刻了，门还是原样，他听不到他熟悉的脚步声，就穿衣出去。
他朝那个有大花园的房子走，不用跑，大步大步疾行。
闵就坐在自家门口台阶上，像等着他似的。
太阳正从山顶树林间升出来，两人都笼罩在阳光中。“我做了一个梦。”两人望着对方同时说，同时住了口。
她梦游般地站了起来。他禁不住朝前几步。
难道他们真的同做了一个梦？裘利安想，若这时闵给他一记耳光会怎么样，那样会很痛快，很过瘾。但是，他要对她说，他一早就在等她，她会跟他过去，他用身体来为梦里梦外的一切误会赔礼道歉，重归于好。
他已经要开口。闵身后的房门吱嘎一声打开，不是郑，而是一个裘利安不认识的青年男子，高大，穿了一身乳白的西装，领带鲜艳，三节皮鞋。裘利安总以为他至少比大多数中国男人长得更有男子汉气，现在，他看到这个中国男人，比他更有吸引力。
那青年男子朝裘利安敷衍地点点头，挽着闵的手朝校园里走。他身上有种高傲的气质，甚至不屑跟他打招呼。本能的反应使裘利安火了，她的新情人！新月社的人！闵和他一起行走的样子极熟，而且举止中有一种长期的亲密感。她说她等于是个处女，好个谎言！梦中说的？梦中的谎言！
裘利安想，他是昏头了。
他想象闵赤裸的身子，在另一个男人的怀里，那个男人，滑入闵那如花的地方。他愤怒得浑身冒火，心跳都加快了。
他气得跑进图书馆转了一圈，像是在追他们，又不像。然后就到办公大楼，但上课还早，他与郑在楼梯间碰见，真是巧合。与郑随便聊了几句，他毫不思索，就说他看到有个男子和闵在一起，长相不错，应该说是完美。此人与闵关系不寻常。
郑笑着说，“那是闵的弟弟，从美国刚回来。路过青岛，要不要给你介绍？”
闵的弟弟？十三四个妻妾的父亲，那有多少兄弟姐妹？裘利安也开玩笑地说：“是啊，能介绍当然好，我就是有点家族病，对男人长相注意些。”他一笑起来，整个人很放松。
郑被一个教师叫走了。
裘利安并不感到如释重负，他刚才的反应太过分，太戏剧化，简直丢脸透了。如果那不是闵的弟弟，他对郑说的话，会有什么后果！他等于在告密，直接伤害闵。
为此，他非常难受，他竟然做出他最讨厌的事。
“这儿的一切真像一个差劲透了的小说。”很多年前，父亲克莱夫对弗吉妮娅阿姨就这么说过。现在才明白，父亲，母亲，阿姨，三人的关系在很早以 前，在他将出生前，就是相当难堪的。只是他们都号称英国最彻底的自由主义者，公众注目的知识界头面人物，自己宣扬的原则，不得不贯彻始终，摆出出奇的爽快 劲儿。到感情出现疙瘩时，比如现在，阿姨就会报复一下，例如拒绝出版他的论文集。
About the Author
'Hong Ying's work [is]… tough, uncompromising, direct and tense with strong emotion, but also full of poetry and grace' Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate
Hong Ying was born in Chingqing in 1962 into a sailor's family. She was the sixth child in a family of eight, and she endured great poverty and hunger as a child. She spent her childhood in the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution, and her mother had to work as a brick labourer to feed the family, while her father was too ill to work. She later discovered that she was in fact the illegitimate daughter of a lover her mother took while her father was in prison.
Hong Ying started her freelance writer's career in early 1980s. One of the very few free-lancers at the time, she wrote both fiction and poetry. In late 1980s she studied in the Lu Xun Creative Writing Academy and Fudan University. In 1991 she came to England and settled in London. Her novels K: The Art of Love and Summer of Betrayal, as well as her autiobiography Daughter of Hunger (called Daughter of the River in the English translation), have been translated and published into 16 languages, including alongside the major European languages, such languages as Finnish, Polish, Israeli, Portugese amp; Vietnamese. Her story collection A Lipstick Called Red Pepper, Fiction about Gay amp; Lesbian Love in China was published in Germany in 1999. She has recently finished her latest novels Ananda and Peacock Cries, on which she has spent three years. Her fiction and poetry have won 9 major prizes in Taiwan since 1990. In mainland China she also won both the critical acclaim and readers’ recognition. Her books have been at the top of the bestseller charts, and she has been acclaimed as one of the ten most popular authors in China in 2000. She now divides her time between London and Beijing.
In 1999 Hong Ying's novel K: The Art of Love was published in Taiwan, a fictionalised account of the true story of the Chinese intellectual who became Julian Bell's lover when he was in China in the 1930s. Known only as ‘K’ in the letters that he wrote home to his mother, the true identity of Julian Bell’s Chinese lover continues to spark controversy to this day. Already dubbed the Chinese Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Hong Ying’s imaginary account of the real-life love affair in the 1930s between Julian Bell, son of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf’s nephew, and Ling Shuhua, one of China’s most highly regarded short-story writers, was the focus of intense legal debate and became the subject of a scandalous court case on the Chinese mainland. The author was sued in Manchuria by Chen Xiaoying, the outraged daughter of Ling Shuhua, who died 12 years ago. The daughter has pronounced the book defamatory and is taking advantage of Chinese law, which stipulates that dead people can be protected from libel.
Denouncing the book as ‘unbearably pornographic’, Chen Xiaoying has brought a lawsuit against Hong Ying and the two Chinese publications that have carried extracts of the novel for causing ‘spiritual damage’. ‘It is very obscene,’ she told the UK ’s Observer at the start of the trial in June 2002. ‘There is no law in England to protect ancestors. But in China the dead cannot be slandered.’ This startling case highlights the fluid boundary between biography, artistic license and China ’s totalitarian legal system. If Hong Ying had lost, she would have faced a fine of 200,000 yuan ($24,000) the banning of the book for an unbelievable 100 years and the seizure of all her property in China. ‘If the court bans K from being published,’ Hong Ying announced at the time, ‘it would be a huge step backwards for modern Chinese writing. It would mean a return to a chaotic, conservative and totalitarian state.’
