Air Hostess: How Love Enters Time and Narrative

Wang Shuo’s Air Hostess is one of the most important novellas from the early part of his career. Published in Dangdai in 1984, it is also commonly regarded as one of the works that established his reputation. It is quite different from the more conspicuous mockery, irony and roguishness of his later Troubleshooters period. At heart, it is a remarkably innocent and even rather melancholy love story.

The novella is narrated in the first person. As a young man, the narrator serves as a sailor in the Chinese navy and meets a girl named Wang Mei. She is still very young and develops a schoolgirl’s admiration and attachment to him in his naval uniform. They then move into separate stages of life: he leaves the navy and returns to civilian society, while Wang Mei grows up and becomes a flight attendant. When they meet again years later, an affection that once belonged partly to adolescent fantasy gradually becomes real love.

Yet theirs is not a simple romance. What matters is that, by the time they are adults, they inhabit very different conditions of life. After returning to civilian society, the narrator is disoriented and disappointed by reality, with a growing tendency towards cynicism. Wang Mei still carries a comparatively pure and idealised expectation of love. They love one another, but their personalities, ways of living, emotional expectations and understandings of the future repeatedly bring them into conflict.

As the novella develops, its central concern becomes less “a sailor falls in love with a flight attendant” than a question: once the pure love of youth truly enters ordinary life, can it remain what it was?

The story ends in tragedy with Wang Mei’s death, giving the whole work an intense sense of loss. That event, however, does not directly reproduce Wang Shuo’s own experience. Air Hostess has a clear autobiographical basis, and Wang later spoke about its connection to a relationship from his youth. The woman in real life did not die as Wang Mei does in the novella; the two of them separated.

For me, the most interesting way to understand the novella is to see it as Wang Shuo before “the later Wang Shuo” had fully formed. The kind of male character that would become familiar in his work is already present: outwardly irreverent, distanced from social rules and reluctant to present himself as noble. But this attitude has not yet expanded into the all-encompassing mockery of Troubleshooters. Beneath the character’s surface indifference lies a powerful emotional life.

Air Hostess therefore captures a characteristic experience of youth. When people are young, they may believe love can exist independently of reality. Only later do they discover that love, too, must enter time, everyday life and the changes that take place within human beings.

For readers who first encountered Wang Shuo through Troubleshooters or Half Flame, Half Brine, Air Hostess can feel like a glimpse of a very different writer. More importantly, that difference draws attention to the fact that some things can happen only when we are young. A healthy body and limited experience influence the narratives a person can form through language, while human beings actually live within a conceptual and logical world composed of narratives.

“Only” does not mean that older people become physically incapable of doing the same thing. It means that the entire set of conditions that made the event possible has disappeared. When we are young, the body is healthy, energy is abundant and risk is felt differently. More importantly, limited experience means that we have not yet built an overwhelmingly large system of interpretation. When many things happen for the first time, they have not already been classified, compared and predicted through an accumulation of past experience.

Following this thought further, the novella is no longer concerned merely with youthful impulsiveness or young love. It reaches a deeper question: age changes more than the body and the quantity of experience. It changes the kinds of world a person is capable of entering. People at different ages do not confront an entirely identical reality, because reality must pass through the experience and language they already possess before it becomes a world they can understand and act within. Youth cannot be recovered simply by repeating the actions of one’s younger self, because the structure of experience that once sustained those actions has changed.

Once experience accumulates, it does not remain in the mind in the raw form of simply “having been through many things”. Language processes a vast amount of it and compresses it into concepts, judgements and narratives: “People like this usually behave in a certain way”; “This is how relationships like this end”; “I have been through something similar before”; “This is not worth it”; “The risk is too great”. The past is no longer merely past. It becomes a model that participates in decisions made in the present.

Growing older, then, can be understood as a process in which the body ages while the narrative system thickens.

This connects directly to the thought that human beings live in a conceptual and logical world made of narratives. Of course we inhabit a physical world, but what most directly guides action is usually not uninterpreted physical fact. It is the world after it has entered a conceptual system. The same person, journey or love affair is not quite the same “object” to someone aged twenty and someone aged sixty. The physical object may be identical, but it enters two entirely different structures of experience and language.

This also helps explain why Air Hostess evokes such a distinct sense of its period and of youth. What cannot be reproduced may not be the bare fact of a young man falling in love with a young flight attendant. It is the narrative through which people at that time understood love, work, distant places and the future. A young person may genuinely believe that a single meeting can change an entire life. With more experience, a dozen interpretations, assessments of risk and possible endings may arise automatically at the very moment a meeting occurs. Experience improves judgement, but it also makes certain worlds less likely to come into being.

There is a striking paradox here. We usually assume that experience makes a person’s world larger because they know more. From another perspective, it can also make the world smaller. The possibilities in reality have not necessarily diminished, but an increasing number of them are explained away by existing narratives before they have the chance to occur.

Perhaps the most precious quality of youth, then, is not simply a healthy body but a model of the world that has not yet hardened. Young people can appear naive precisely because concepts have not processed everything in advance. Yet that condition of not knowing is what allows certain events to become possible—events that can never later be repeated in quite the same way.

Seen from this perspective, the love in Air Hostess enters not only ordinary life but also a narrative system formed jointly by language, experience and time. Language helps us understand the world that has already happened, while continually narrowing, enlarging and even predetermining the world we can enter next. This may be the deepest source of melancholy in Wang Shuo’s early novella. What is lost is not only a person or a love, but the world that once made that love possible.