Summary

In Part 1, Chapter 1, Lin Daiyu is dressed as a boy and is starving. She contemplates stealing fish, “but by the time I decide, the fish woman has noticed me” (4). The other vendors surround her and someone yells “we’ll give him a good whipping” (4). Suddenly, a man steps in on her behalf and rescues her from their wrath. He offers to buy her noodles and she follows him. “I am a girl, [she] blurts out” (6). “We keep walking until I do not know where we are anymore,” and “I understand that we will never arrive at the noodle shop” (7).

In Part 1, Chapter 2, she tells the “story of how [she] got her name,” which is derived from a famous Chinese myth about a boy who falls in love with his cousin, but is forbidden to marry her (8). His parents outwit him and marry him...