Fortress Besieged: Why We Keep Wanting Someone Else’s Life

Geoffrey Chen

100 Works of World Literature · Article 92

# Fortress Besieged: Why We Keep Wanting Someone Else’s Life

Fang Hung-chien spends years studying aimlessly in Europe and earns no doctorate. To satisfy the family and prospective father-in-law who funded him, he buys a diploma from the fictional Carleton University. He knows it is false and imagines using it only where a little falsehood performs a necessary truth. The compromise enters employment, courtship, university politics, and marriage until he cannot calmly say who he is.

Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged is famous for the image of marriage as a fortress: outsiders want in and insiders want out. The walls exceed marriage. Foreign study, doctoral title, intellectual society, San Lü University, career, and family respectability promise a complete self and reveal more performance and comparison inside.

The jokes are so dense that readers may collect metaphors and forget wartime transport, migration, scarcity, and uncertainty. After laughing, ask who can turn calamity into wit, whose choices are narrowed by money and family, and whether Fang merely suffers his age or builds walls through delay, ambiguity, and fear of responsibility.

Writing one class of people as humanity

  • Author: Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998), writer and scholar of Chinese classics and several Western literary traditions.
  • Composition: begun in 1944, completed in 1946; the preface is dated 15 December 1946.
  • First appearance: serialised in Renaissance magazine.
  • Book: Morning Light Publishing Company, Shanghai, May 1947; nine chapters.
  • Revision: revised for People’s Literature Publishing House in 1980, with later small changes.
  • English: translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, first published in 1979 and later included in Penguin Modern Classics.

Qian’s preface says that, while depicting one part of modern Chinese society and a type of person, he did not forget they remained human. Vanity, jealousy, and self-deception are not confined to a country or era.

Why buy the false doctorate?

Fang changes interests in Europe without completing an advanced degree. He dislikes passing himself off as a scholar and fears returning empty-handed.

He calls the diploma a prop to comfort elders, not professional fraud. Inward knowledge of falsity supposedly preserves partial honesty.

Social identity cannot be privately limited. Others address, hire, and compare him through the document; every uncorrected assumption makes later truth more expensive.

Why Carleton University looks real

The invented institution has an English name, seals, diploma format, and broker, enough for a society hungry for overseas credentials and poor at international verification.

At San Lü University, Han Hsueh-yu is also connected to the same diploma mill. Fang’s shame is a product of institutional demand, not isolated accident.

When employers value title, families demand triumphant return, and candidates need entry, fraud supplies the symbol the system requests.

The liner as floating society

Returning to China as war approaches, passengers continue measuring dress, degree, engagement, and romance. Confined shipboard space accelerates gossip and desire.

Fang meets Dr Su Wen-wan and Miss Pao, who is engaged. Su expects courtship within refinement; Pao manages flirtation more directly; Fang moves between vanity and appetite.

The ship is the first fortress. Everyone wants land while reproducing a complete status market on board.

Miss Pao and the vanity of being used

Miss Pao approaches Fang and has a brief liaison, then returns to her fiancé upon landing.

Fang enjoys being selected and senses he was temporary. He prefers to package the experience as masculine adventure rather than admit he was also belittled.

The satire does not punish a “loose woman” alone. Both use the other for self-image, though gender assigns unequal reputational costs.

Dr Su needs romantic confirmation

Su has doctorate, wealth, and social skill. She preserves reserve and expects Fang to court her within an ordered field of rivals.

He does not love her enough, enjoys her attention, and delays refusal. “Nothing was explicitly said” keeps an exit and lets her invest under ambiguity.

Her later revenge reflects vanity; his indecision is not innocent passivity.

Chao Hsin-mei, rival into friend

Chao has long loved Su and sees Fang as competitor. Capable, well-connected, and decisive, he begins in hostility.

When he learns Fang does not truly seek Su, rivalry turns to friendship. Their journey towards San Lü University consolidates it.

Chao has pride and blind spots but accepts decisions and consequences more readily. His contrast reveals that some of Fang’s helplessness is habit.

Tang Hsiao-fu is not a lost perfect woman

Su introduces her younger cousin Tang, intelligent and unforced. Fang falls quickly in love.

Because the relation is brief, readers may treat her as the one pure exit. Such perfection also comes from a possibility never tested by work, family, and money.

Tang rejects him after Su’s disclosures, but Fang’s concealment and ambiguity are real. He loses not only a chance to fate but trust through delayed honesty.

Truth as revenge

After rejection, Su tells Tang about Miss Pao and Fang’s ambiguity. Much is true; the purpose is destructive.

Fang wants Tang to distinguish past confusion from present sincerity but had not voluntarily explained either.

Truth used maliciously does not become false. Fact and motive for narration can both be compromised.

Geography cannot reset character

After Tang and unsatisfactory Shanghai work, Fang accepts a teaching job inland. Distance appears to erase romance, family, and diploma.

The move resolves none. A new institution immediately asks for credentials, rank, and alliance.

Changing city changes stage, not the performer’s habits.

Why the wartime journey is miserable

The story unfolds near the beginning of full-scale war. Transport is crowded and broken, goods scarce, universities displaced inland, and employment entangled with national crisis.

The group must transfer, seek rooms, guard baggage, and bargain for food. Cultural salvation lands in arguments over seats and carrying loads.

War is not absent because the battlefield stays offstage. It narrows resources and magnifies selfishness and vanity.

Five travellers losing polish

Fang, Chao, Li Mei-t’ing, Ku Erh-chien, and Sun Jou-chia begin with degrees, posts, and politeness. Travel reveals stinginess, opportunism, flattery, and judgement.

Li carries goods and calculates advantage; Ku survives through agreement; Sun appears quiet and dependent while observing and arranging.

The journey tests burden-sharing without stable institutional protection.

Is Sun merely scheming?

Sun is a young woman teacher with fewer resources than the men. She relies on Fang and Chao and learns to use expectations of feminine weakness for protection.

She later uses implication, hurt, and family pressure around marriage. Reducing her to manipulation is inadequate.

When a woman travelling alone and seeking work invites suspicion, strategy is survival. The problem is that neither she nor Fang turns strategy into open negotiation.

San Lü University as improvised ideal

The displaced university claims a cultural mission while buildings, courses, money, and staffing remain unstable. President Kao Sung-nien clothes balance of power in moral language.

Teachers compare degree, salary, title, and proximity to leadership. Scholarship becomes an extension of appointment politics.

The novel does not deny education. It shows knowledge symbols becoming currency under opaque rules.

Han and the shared fake credential

Department chair Han’s foreign degree and scholarship are dubious, eventually touching the same Carleton University. Fang despises and fears the reflection.

He cannot expose Han without risking himself. Shared secret creates mutual suspicion rather than solidarity.

Falsehood survives not because nobody knows, but because those who know depend on it too.

President Kao’s adaptable principles

Kao explains appointments, morality, and school interest according to need. Everyone receives hope; few receive accountable promises.

Fang despises this flexibility and uses ambiguity similarly in private life. Scales differ, logic echoes: never be definite, and circumstances can revise everything.

Satirist and target repeatedly mirror each other.

Chao’s departure

After gossip and conflict, Chao leaves for another post and political environment. Networks and decision create an exit.

Without his ally, Fang’s university standing weakens. The apparently independent appointment depended on introduction and coalition.

Ability includes who can open the next gate.

Intelligence without professional practice

Fang reads widely, reacts quickly, and detects absurdity. He lacks stable specialisation and sustained investment.

He criticises institutional unfairness accurately and avoids preparation, choice, and persistence. Seeing through others consoles his insecurity.

Insight without action can become an advanced defence against failure.

How engagement happens

Shared travel, gossip, and dependency make Fang and Sun look like a couple before they decide to be one. Others name the relationship and they accept momentum.

He is uncertain of love but fears loneliness, injury, and another missed chance. She seeks stability and believes their life can be organised.

The entrance to a fortress is often a series of “since things have come this far”.

Tang and Sun beyond purity versus worldliness

Tang remains a possibility and therefore bright. Sun endures poverty, employment, families, and daily friction and becomes complex.

Calling Tang true love and Sun mistake assigns failure to female selection. Fang delays truth in both and first enjoys attention.

The unrealised relationship looks perfect because life never tests it—another imagined life outside the marital wall.

Families enter the marriage

In Shanghai, marriage immediately joins parents, siblings, aunt, housing, gifts, and economic judgement.

Fang’s family uses older household roles; Sun’s aunt brings modern employment and social resources. Each calls intervention protection.

The couple has no agreed boundary and summons original families as witnesses. Relatives build the walls together.

Help from Sun’s aunt

The aunt can arrange work and offer urban knowledge while disrespecting Fang. Her help strengthens Sun and places a third authority in the marriage.

Fang concentrates resentment on the aunt because that is easier than naming spousal values. Sun treats her resources as security.

Dependence and autonomy are not opposites; dependence determines who may evaluate the couple.

Why work becomes marital quarrel

Fang’s Shanghai work is unstable; income, dignity, and direction remain uncertain. As Sun seeks her own position, they dispute whose opportunity deserves accommodation.

Surface quarrels concern tone and relatives. Underneath lie scarce resources: who may quit, move, and be considered important?

Marriage is not feeling outside economics. Without a shared plan, each job decision sounds like a verdict on the spouse.

Is Fang kind?

He is rarely malicious and retains sympathy. Readers therefore excuse his failures.

Not intending harm does not prevent harm. He lets Su misunderstand, hides from Tang, avoids decisions with Sun, and relies on others to find exits.

A gentle, intelligent conflict-avoider can transfer costs through indecision.

Is Sun only controlling?

Sun tests, arranges, and uses emotion. She fears Fang’s drift will make common life impossible.

Control is real and not uncaused. His weak commitment drives her towards rules, job, and aunt; more control creates more retreat, and retreat proves the need for control.

Interactive defence constructs the marital fortress.

Gender and satirical cruelty

Su, Pao, Sun, and other women receive sharp treatment of appearance, vanity, and calculation. At times this carries male spectatorship and period prejudice.

Men are also attacked, but consequences are not symmetrical; women’s bodies and marital value more often become jokes.

Readers can admire technique and ask who gets a full background and who is fixed by a metaphor. Greatness does not remove blind spots.

Why intellectuals are the targets

Characters know classics, languages, and cultural missions without becoming more honest or cooperative. Learning supplies title, quotation, and taste distinction.

Qian is not anti-learning; the prose depends on enormous learning. He rejects the automatic equation of knowledge and character.

Philosophy of love does not make refusal honest; educational patriotism does not make hiring fair; detecting fraud does not make Fang burn his diploma.

Metaphors like rapid fire

Unexpected comparisons turn psychology into food, animal, object, and bodily action, revealing self-deception instantly.

Density creates distance too. A wound quickly becomes a joke; scarcity and war enter intelligent language.

Wit exposes the world and can protect the wit from grief. That discomfort belongs to the reading.

The title beyond marriage

Marriage is the besieged fortress outsiders enter and insiders leave. Fang and Sun literalise it.

The pattern also governs doctorate, Tang, university, and secure work. Before entry, each completes him; after approach, flaws dominate.

The metaphor does not make desire meaningless. It shows how the unknown interior is idealised and known reality depreciated. Refusing the losses of choice places real life always elsewhere.

Private satire within war

War encircles cities, institutions, and households at a greater scale. Courtship and titles look small and continue anyway.

Ordinary people do not stop vanity, employment, and quarrel because history is grand. Crisis makes small choices urgent.

Class matters. People discussing professorship during flight are not the most devastated. This is one social segment, not a national panorama.

The final quarrel without melodrama

Accumulated disputes over work, relatives, movement, and dignity culminate. Sun leaves and Fang falls asleep in exhaustion.

No adultery, court, or death is needed. Relations can be eroded by every argument becoming proof of who suffers more.

Reconciliation and separation both remain possible, appropriately open for the fortress cycle.

The inaccurate old clock

An old household clock strikes an inaccurate hour. It belongs to family and marriage and continues functioning after its measurement has fallen out of step.

Characters believe they seize timing: Fang marries before missing another chance; Sun organises before life loses control. They rely on a clock that cannot tell the time.

The sound offers no verdict and reminds us that lived time cannot be recalibrated by wit.

What Fang actually lacks

He has intelligence and repeated openings through Chao, family, Mr Chou, university, and Sun.

He lacks the habit of sustaining choice: invest after accepting an opportunity, disclose error early, bear another’s disappointment when refusing, rather than let circumstances decide.

His predicament is institutional and personal. Social criticism alone absolves him; character criticism alone erases credential worship, opaque hiring, and war.

A practical reading method

List each fortress: doctorate, Su, Tang, university, marriage, stable job. Compare fantasy before entry with dissatisfaction after.

Mark every moment Fang could clarify: diploma, Su, Pao, engagement, employment. What cost does silence add?

Beside each metaphor, record material fact. Enjoy language without letting brilliance cover war, money, and gender.

Why it remains necessary

Credential inflation, foreign titles, recruitment, and social images still create Carleton Universities. Verification improves while résumé packaging expands.

In relationships, ambiguity is still called kindness and indecision harmless. Careers locate “real life” in the next job.

The lesson is not that marriage is misery. Every choice has an ordinary interior, friction, and limit. Loving only the imagined exterior makes a life of changing fortresses without inhabiting one.

Conclusion: delay also builds walls

Fang is not a simple villain. He is clever, funny, ashamed, and alert to hypocrisy. This makes him modern: we too believe that lack of ill intent removes responsibility for delayed truth.

A fake diploma becomes a wall around employment; ambiguity with Su destroys Tang’s trust; a marriage formed through momentum leaves both spouses feeling besieged.

The deepest fortress is placing complete life on the other side and refusing clear responsibility for the side chosen. Laughter ends under an old clock: those best at explaining life may not know how to use the time passing through it.

Further reading and sources

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