Translated from Taiwanese (Mandarin) by Jenna Tang, the novel presents interconnected stories of three women. Fang Si-Chi — 13 years old at the beginning of the novel — is repeatedly raped over a period of “two thousand nights” by Lee Guo-Hua, whom she calls Teacher Lee. He is 37 years older. As he rapes her, he tells her, “This is how Teacher shows you he loves you, do you understand?” The second story is of Iwen, Fang's friend and neighbour, who is married to a man 20 years her senior, Chien Yi-Wei. Chien brutalises and beats his wife, who loves him unconditionally, because when he is sober, he is “the most adorable man”. But her bruises tell their own stories: “When she took showers, lwen would place her hand on top of an injury that was bigger than her palm...” Finally, the novel is also the story of Guo Hsiao-Chi, another survivor of Teacher Lee’s barbaric, cyclical sexual abuse. In all these individual stories, Lin ultimately exposes the amoral glob of public opinion, which abandons, shames, or disregards each of these women’s experiences, and instead favours the rapists and the abusers because of their powerful position in society — not only because of their gender.

One of the novel’s most fascinating aspects is the use of similes and metaphors to describe harrowing experiences. When the violence is too blinding, it can only be accessed in associative images, so bruises take on the colour of eggplants and red-orange shrimp, physical abuse becomes a moment of spiritual dispersion as the soul leaps out of the body to escape its humiliation. Language works like a forest fire in many ways; one word can cause a series of thoughts that spread wildly in our minds. Lin captures this brilliantly.

In one of her essays, Fang writes of how she imagines paradise: “In love, I often see paradise. In this paradise, there are horses with hair of white gold kissing each other in pairs, while a little bit of steam rises from the ground.” Teacher Lee makes her believe their relationship is rooted in deep love. When Fang asks him whether he loves her, he responds gently, respectfully and decently – his three coded behaviours to hide just how monstrous he is: “I love you more than I love my daughter. I can’t believe I don’t even feel bad saying that. It’s all your fault. You’re too beautiful.” The most tragic moments in the novel are when Fang tries to convince herself of these glib lies, because the alternative is too painful. She deliberately evades the omniscient narrator’s disclaimer, that “Teacher Lee was doom cloaked in love, or its metaphor.”

Despite knowing that her abuse is diabolical as well as an unpardonable criminal offence, Fang is never able to confess to her childhood friend Yi-Ting that Teacher Lee has been regularly violating her body and mind. Once, when she indirectly reveals it, Lin denies her best friend’s truth, and instead levels shame and humiliation at her. Yi-Ting’s moral stance represents the hypocrisy of patriarchal social values.

The novel is at its raging best when it indicts this system of power and the language that smothers women’s freedoms but allows men free rein on their carnal odysseys. Iwen is mistreated by her alcoholic, abusive husband. She fears his arrival at home, becomes paranoid about his drinking patterns, and closes herself off as a coping mechanism. He beats her at night but apologizes in the morning. Similarly, when another student, Guo Hsiao-Chi announces on a social media website that Teacher Lee abused her for years too, strangers drown her in hate comments and assassinate her character instead. In both the subplots, the survivors’ families and friends are absent, or worse, in Hsiao-Chi’s case, humiliate her even more by suggesting that she could not be a daughter of their house if she had sullied their name by sleeping with a teacher. Each of these women lives on the margins of this irredeemably corrupt society.

The book shines when these characters’ consciousness is presented with shocking precision. Si-Chi’s deterioration is documented in her internal monologues, which she has also recorded in her diary. Yi-Ting discovers this diary later and regrets dismissing her friend. Iwen’s fear and psychological distress is almost tangible. Hsiao-Chi’s numbed sense of self and spiralling trauma become a phantom that attaches itself to her, weighing her down. Eerily blending the foresight of an omniscient narrator and the intimacy of a first-person account, the prose also relates the chilling inner world of Teacher Lee, who considers himself a misunderstood genius. “The world’s understanding of him couldn’t hold a candle to how much his stubble understood him.” There is a method to his monstrosity: “He never touched girls from wealthy families because that would mean trouble.” He is an expert at what we call gaslighting, preying on teenage girls and corrupting their ideas of love beyond redemption. “He would think about how careful and crazy he was, carrying an ego so bright and bloated…”

In the final sections, Fang Si-Chi’s diary is presented to a feminist lawyer, who simply says: “There’s nothing we can do. We need evidence. Without any evidence, his team would sue you for defamation and he would win.” By this time, Fang is in an asylum, a shell of herself. “Even napping at her desk for 10 minutes, she would dream about him inserting himself into her, so every time she fell asleep, she felt like she would die of suffocation,” Lin writes about Fang's crumbling inner world. But the social evaluation of this trauma is non-existent. In the final scene of the book, Teacher Lee is at a dinner table with parents of girls he has molested over the years, with Chien in attendance too. “Everybody laughed. Everyone was gleeful.”

Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise burns a hole in your heart with its unflinchingly honest representation of the evil that surrounds us but is hidden in the facetious performance of decency. It is an art that some men have mastered with social and institutional support that acquits them of their perversions. In our world, abusers rule billboards and address political rallies with utmost confidence. This novel is about keeping our rage alive in the face of all this. “Tolerance isn’t a virtue, and taking tolerance as a virtue is a way this pretentious world lies to maintain its depraved sense of discipline. Rage is a virtue,” writes Lin. It is a virtue that must be burnished and maintained if we are to confront the ruthless world of male self-gratification.

Kartik Chauhan is an independent reviewer and writer. He lives in New Delhi.