Summer, the thirtysomething heroine of Lee Wei-Jing’s posthumously published novel The Mermaid’s Tale, lives by herself and is as professionally unambitious as she is romantically unbothered. Instead, she is driven by her dream of becoming a ballroom dancer.
It is an all-consuming, solitary obsession; Summer stays up watching videos of performances late at night, practises steps alone in her room and spends her meagre earnings on expensive private lessons. There’s just one problem: she needs a dance partner.
The competitive world of professional ballroom dancing is described with a wealth of detail by Wei-Jing, and Summer’s quest for the perfect dance partner is an obvious metaphor for the search for a life partner in societies with enduring patriarchal rules. In the world of ballroom as in life, there are strict — and often absurd — rules that she must navigate.
“As long as you keep at it, as long as you don’t give up, you’ll find a partner, someone who’s right for you, someday,” she writes at the peak of her obsession. And, to make it all worse, the ballroom dancing circuit is rife with seemingly arbitrary yet nonetheless deal-breaking criteria when it comes to pairing up dancers: height, weight, physique, social background, disposition of character, responsiveness to feedback and attention to detail are all carefully considered.
Summer seems destined for a mismatch, like a Louisa May Alcott character: one dancing partner is unpredictably aggressive, another isn’t well versed in dance steps, a third requires her to lead rather than being led, and her favourite — her dance teacher Donny — struggles with his own sexual orientation. “It seems like pair relationships, whether the pair are dance partners, lovers, teacher and student, husband and wife, parent and child, tend towards cruelty and violence as a general rule,” Summer says. “That doesn’t make being alone any easier. In fact, there’s nothing worse.”
The novel’s title alludes to The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about a young mermaid who longs to leave the ocean and live as a human, with tragic consequences. Through sparse, dreamy and often surreal passages, it is clear Summer actually considers herself a mermaid too — obsessed with becoming a dancer yet clearly out of her element in the ballroom. “Such are the tales that elders tell young mermaids so they will know not to cross the line or break the rules,” she reflects.
An art critic and journalist who died in 2018, Lee Wei-Jing won the Taipei Book Fair Award for her 2010 debut, My Name Is Hsu Liang-Liang. Her dry tone, translated here by Darryl Sterk, serves well her purpose of rendering the tedious and anxiety-inducing search for a life mate, with all its pitfalls and unkept promises. Yet the novel, with its anticlimactic structure, reads much like a stately waltz, when Summer’s story may have been better told with the passion of a tango.
The Mermaid’s Taleby Lee Wei-Jing, translated by Darryl Sterk, Scribner UK £12.99, 208 pages
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