Jennifer Fan

BELLA, a Chinese-Canadian writer and pianist, will have her tragic love trilogy, which stemmed from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, published in English in New Delhi on the fifth anniversary of the unprecedented disaster.

“9/11 Celestial Wedding,” the first volume in Bella’s “9/11 Love Trilogy,” was translated by Dr. Ann Huss, who teaches Chinese at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The other two volumes, “Bella’s Secret Garden” and “Sentimental Casablanca” will follow soon in English editions, Bella told the Shenzhen Daily in a recent e-mail interview.

Her skill in inventing incredible romance, sustained by desperate yearning for eternal love, has won her the titles of “symbol of neoromanticism in China” from scholars and “goddess of love” from readers. She has even been called a “D.H. Lawrence for the new century” by the Beijing News, after her novels were published on the mainland and Taiwan starting in 2002.

Before her 9/11 love trilogy, she was hardly considered more than a Chinese woman wandering in foreign countries with pretty piano and painting skills and shallow writing experience.

The 2001 disaster changed the United States and much of the world, including the author. Bella lost her lover in the World Trade Center. The last words from the Wall Street man to Bella was a mobile message that read “Bella, I love you,” as she mentioned in an interview with one Chinese women’s magazine.

The message from her dead lover created a sudden and unerasable pain. One month after 9/11, she found a way to wash away her sorrow, remorse and helplessness. Once she began writing the love fantasy, she couldn’t stop. Indeed, she published her fourth book in the 9/11 serials, “Bella’s Forest,” in 2003 and is working on the fifth.

“I don’t write for fame or money because they are meaningless to me when the most important person has vanished from my life forever. Writing is a cure to the deep scars in my heart,” Bella said.

Like a sleepy volcano suddenly erupting, she writes “because there are too many stories to pour out and many stories surge within me.” If she didn’t write there “would be sleepless nights and I would feel stifled and might even collapse.”

Bella, whose real name is Shen Lei, was born in Shanghai into a distinguished family of doctors in the 1960s. She left China at 20 to study in Italy and Japan, majoring in piano and musical composition. Then she moved to the United States, where she met and lost her lover, Graham, the prototype of her novels’ hero.

In her “9/11 Celestial Wedding,” on Sept. 11, 2001, a Shanghai girl Wang Chunjie and her American fiancé, Graham, were going to hold their wedding ceremony at Trinity Church on Wall Street. But the tragedy unfolded when the bridegroom went to his office on the 102nd floor of the World Trade Center to get a new tie.

Later Bella meets John, an American who lost his daughter on Sept. 11, on her trip back to Shanghai. In her following books, the two console each other with violent passion, but the journey to forget or search for real love is long and difficult for Bella.

Many perceive Bella’s fiction, which is narrated in the first person with a shadow of herself, as her biography, but in fact it is not.

“I did knit my own sad story into the first book, but the other two are pure imagination,” said Bella. She called herself a “daydreamer,” who resorts to forest, music, and writing after losing her lover in the 9/11 attacks.

On the mainland, her trilogy has sold some 200,000 copies. She has received extensive feedbacks from her readers, good or bad, after one book in the trilogy, “Bella’s Secret Garden,” was serialized on China’s major search portal, www.sina.com.

Praising Bella’s work as “a milestone of the 9/11 literature of the new century,” critic Ye Shuxian commented that in her work, “the theme of death and love is mysteriously entangled together to the degree that we simply cannot resist our own desire to know what happens.”

To some critics and readers, however, the surreal romance is too far from the life of ordinary people, undermining the value of her books. Critic Meng Fanhua regards the fiction’s “modern” life of an Oriental beauty who has affairs with elite Westerners as “not petty bourgeois but middle-class bourgeois, a superficial display of ‘transnational cultural capital.’”

To Bella, pure and eternal love can be transnational. “A love is pure as along as they love each other with heart and soul, no matter where they are from,” she asserted.

Admitting her limit in reflecting the real world, Bella said she will write more about the struggle for pure and eternal love. “Playing the piano and writing romance is what life means to me,” she said.