The Labyrinth of Addiction in Yiyun Li's by Mai Yamamoto
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also some reason in madness." So observed the great German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche in "On Reading and Writing." Decades later, Chinese author Yiyun Li described the life of one miserable, stubborn, middle-aged woman named Sansan in a short story “Love in the Marketplace." In this essay, I examine what the madness is in this story and the reasons for it: how Sansan becomes addicted to seeking empathy after she is betrayed by her fiancé, Tu and her only best friend, Min. First, I consider Sansan's relationship with Tu and Min and what their betrayal does to her. Then, I show how Sansan tries to ease her mind through her relationship with her mother, her favorite film Casablanca, and the sunflower seeds she craves. Finally, I explain how and why Sansan is affected by the man in the marketplace who appears at the very end of this story and asks for money in return for letting people cut his flesh. Sansan's addiction to
empathy is initially caused by her beautiful friendship with Tu and Min and their betrayal. In “Love in the Marketplace," Sansan is described as an ordinary woman. Although she is not disappointed by her life, she is not confident about herself. However, after she gets in a romantic relationship with Tu, her life begins to be brilliant. She feels comfortable because she has a person who accepts her and gives her a place where she can belong. The presence of Tu makes her more confident. After she becomes best friends with Min, Sansan can project herself more positively. She often compares her appearance with Min's and adores Min's beauty. She even recognizes Min as the most beautiful of all the women she has met in her life. Therefore, being best friends with Min makes Sansan mentally stronger. Psychological research confirms that people can be more satisfied with people whom they admire. With Tu and Min, Sansan can comfortably share what she cannot share outside of the community of three, and she gets empathy from them. Unfortunately, however, her overconfidence makes her blind. The betrayal by the very people Sansan trusts the most is devastating and affects her life more than she expected. While she seems to be all right without them, she unconsciously relies on them and clings to them deeply. By the time she realizes how important their existence is to her, it is too late to win them back. Once again, she is alone, struggling with low self-esteem. Through the betrayal of Tu and Min, Sansan loses her confidence and comfort. Based on the results of her research on romantic love, Helen Fisher concludes that strong feelings of falling in love have a connection to mental illness, such as addiction (Grayson). In her investigations, she asked seventeen people who were madly in love to take an MRI, staring first at a neutral picture and the second time at a picture of their lovers. When they saw their lovers' pictures, their brains showed higher neural activity in the area related to rewards and pleasure, the roots of addiction and craving. For example, when we eat chocolates, get money, or take a drug, that area shows the same response as when we are in love. Similarly, Sansan cannot stand the emptiness in her heart without her love for Tu and strongly needs something to fill it up. Moreover, according to Kaplan and Sadock'sComprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, people unconsciously defend themselves for protecting their ego against anxiety when they face unacceptable situations (Tatsukawa). One of these unconscious defense mechanisms is rationalization, by which one tries to justify one's undesirable reality. Since Sansan does not receive positive reinforcement from her society, she needs some empathy in order to justify herself. As a result, she begins her journey in search of empathy outside the community, as if she is addicted to getting empathy. Sansan never relies on her mother mentally, even though she does not have any one else she can ask for help. There are two reasons why she avoids seeking empathy from her mother. One is that her mother always opposes her. All the conversations between them in this story have a belligerent tone. Whenever her mother opens her mouth, she starts to disagree with how Sansan is choosing to live her life. Her opinions about Sansan's failure in the marriage to Tu are especially clear and she criticizes her daughter's decision as stupid. She even regards this as the trigger of her father's suicide, although it is even uncertain whether he commits suicide or not. Since Sansan strongly believes that her love is noble and genuine, she cannot bear her mother's negative critiques of her. Her mother treats her as if she were an immature child. According to the story, Sansan has never even seen her mother since her father's death one year before. The other reason Sansan cannot seek empathy from her mother is that she notices that they are too much alike. They refuse to hear each other's advice about the most important thing in their lives: preparing the very best hard-boiled eggs, in her mother's case, and romantic love in Sansan's. It frustrates Sansan that her mother stubbornly sticks to her own way of hardboiled eggs, regardless of profit (102). On the other hand, it disgusts her mother that Sansan clings to her own faith in romance. She does not understand why her daughter stubbornly keeps rejecting the proposal of marriage with Tu after his divorce and why she shows her no gratitude. Although Sansan knows her mother is “the only person who loves her despite who she is" (108), she does not seek empathy from her for these two reasons: her mother's critical views of her behavior and values, and Sansan and her mother's negative similarities, about which she cannot help reminding herself when she talks with her mother. Her mother's love is not what she wants at this moment. Sansan does not need any critique of her life, but empathy which would wrap her tender heart softly.
Then, how does Sansan try to get empathy and fill her loneliness? Nobody accepts and understands Sansan the way she would like them to. At that time, she sees the film, Casablanca. In this film, the main character, Rick Blaine, who owns the bar in Casablanca, plays a role similar to Sansan's. One day in Casablanca, which is occupied by both the Vichy government and the Nazis, he is dramatically reunited with his ex-girlfriend, Ilsa Lund. She comes to his bar with her husband, Victor Laszlo, who is a member of an extreme anti-Nazi group and is at risk of being captured and sent to a concentration camp. Although Rick still loves Ilsa, he helps her and her husband escape to neutral Portugal. Sansan watches this film again and again after the betrayal of Tu and Min. She can see herself in Rick, who supports Victor and Ilsa, hiding his love for Ilsa, and she tries to get empathy from it. “Introjection," a defense mechanism, analyzed by Anna Freud, is similar to what Sansan does with the film. Psychoanalysis defines it as the identification with idealized people or objects. By watching a similar plot to her life, Sansan can easily introject herself into Rick and receive empathy from it. Since this romance film, Casablanca has been acclaimed all over the world (it won three Oscars in 1944 and was selected No.1 for Top 10 Romantic Movies), she can beautify her life and gain confidence, too. In addition, Sansan is not only watching this film by herself, but also shows it to her students many times. This is because she attempts to make society empathize with her. She would like society to realize that what Rick does in this great film, whose ending makes people's eyes red with tears, is very close to her life. Since she has received only negative reactions from society, she is eager to be recognized as a miserable, but faithful princess in the tragedy and to have people empathize with her situation. Generally, students are people who create new societies for the near future and some of them are easily influenced in the process of growing. Therefore, it is the best opportunity for her to teach her ideas and justify what she has been. However, Sansan's plan of making the society empathize with her does not work well. After watching the film repeatedly, students get bored with its idealistic story and do not watch it seriously any more. While she strongly believes that people can learn everything about their lives from Casablanca, students obviously are not interested in it as they were at first. They are no longer moved by the tired romantic refrain. Here, Sansan faces the death of empathy and is losing her confidence to complete her plan. After she almost gave up getting empathy from society, her addiction still does not end. Instead of gathering empathy from others, she starts to create her own world in order to get empathy from herself. Building up her weird world, she uses opium-tainted sunflower seeds for comfort. This is another defense mechanism called, simply, "escape." Escaping from unacceptable reality, she starts to justify herself on her own. There is a scene in which she reaches for the comfort of her crunchy sunflower seeds when she cannot stand her insane delusion about Tu and Min. Moreover, the detailed description of Sansan chewing sunflower seeds proves how deeply she concentrates on only herself and her world and tries not to think about Tu, Min, and her society. Whenever she gets sick of her conflict, she can escape from negative things into her world with sunflower seeds. In her world, there is nobody against her theory, but just her ideals and beliefs. That is why she can seize comfort and justify herself not as a miserable unmarried middle-aged woman, but a princess in a romantic tragedy. This is a much easier way than the trial of getting empathy from society. Although she can maintain her mental condition by feeding her craving for sunflower seeds and by living inside of herself, she loses it suddenly because the store which sold her favorite sunflower seeds is shut down for using opium in their goods. When she finds she can no longer buy these intoxicating sunflower seeds, she loses access to her paradise. Now she realizes it is impossible to make others understand her with the help of Casablanca, and she is exiled from her own opiated dreamworld. She needs to discover another path to empathy and comfort. At this time, a mysterious man appears in front of her in the marketplace, and this story and Sansan's melancholy journey in search of empathy are headed toward their end. The man begs for money but will accept it only if the giver agrees to cut him in return. He stubbornly rejects money from Sansan's mother since she refuses to cut his body. Although he is laughed at as an idiot by the crowds, he has his own beliefs and strongly keeps them. Meeting with this man and observing his extreme behavior, Sansan finds clear similarities between herself and him. According to HelpGuide.org, self-injury also includes addiction (Cutter). Arguably, both Sansan and this strange man have a certain mental weakness in that they cannot stop craving something. In addition, they are both treated as outsiders in their community. Their faiths are considered too idealistic to be accepted, and neither is able to explain their beliefs and actions very well to others. Sansan and the man in the marketplace seem especially sensitive about keeping their promises. In theory, Sansan could forget about Tu's betrayal and could marry another man. In theory, the man in the marketplace could take the money Sansan's mother offers him and accept her refusal to cut his flesh in exchange. If they were able to make these choices, they could have so-called better lives. However, they cannot allow themselves to be released from their promises. In this man who is stubbornly steadfast in his faith, Sansan at last finds someone who holds the same ideas about a promise. As she dedicates the rest of her life to keeping her promise, the man before her eyes is trying to sacrifice his own flesh in order to fulfill his promise. No matter how much they are seen as outsiders, as if they were products below the standard among mass-produced ones in a Chinese factory, a promise is not a promise for them until it is fulfilled. Since Sansan knows so well the reason why this man needs somebody to cut his flesh, she slices his arm and completes his promise. Then, why is the man a trigger for Sansan to be mentally cured and free from the addiction to empathy? Why is she still suffering from it after she hears about Tu's divorce? This is because she finally learned to share empathy when she meets the man. Since Tu and Min got married, Sansan has been merely asking for empathy from the society. She selfishly believes she is right, Tu, Min and the ignorant society are evil, and all of her misfortune comes from such evil people. She does not know why people cannot understand that she deserves empathy. Moreover, although Tu's divorce seems the best solution to ease Sansan, this is actually based on a breach of marriage vows. That is why, for Sansan, his divorce is not the result of Tu keeping his promise with Sansan, but of his breaking his promise with Min. However, when she meets the man in the marketplace, she experiences a defining emotion. She at last can find someone who may truly understand her and whom she can totally trust. She cannot help empathizing with him and making him free from the promise which ties him as much as her promise ties her. She no longer asks for something in a unilateral way, but learns to give empathy unconsciously. People can get empathy only when they give empathy. Therefore, at this point, she is released from the labyrinth of addiction to empathy. In this short essay, I have explained from a psychological perspective what triggers Sansan's addiction to empathy and how she overcomes it. What is now apparent is that this love story, while only nineteen pages long, describes not the beautiful surface of romance, but the ugly and melancholy truth which human beings have deep inside.
Works Cited and Consulted
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