Background
Destiny of Rebirth was written by Chen Duansheng, an 18-year-old girl from a well-off family during the rule of the Qing dynasty (1636-1912). Her motivation for writing the book is described in the beginning of the first chapter: She and her friends were unsatisfied with the ending of Destiny of a Jade Bracelet, a book written earlier in the Qing dynasty by an anonymous female author, and so to alleviate this feeling of unsatisfaction as well as to just pass the time, she wrote this book as a sequel to Destiny of a Jade Bracelet.
Characters
Because the story is a sequel, many of the characters and names that show up will have originated from Destiny of a Jade Bracelet. In fact, the story follows the reincarnations of many of the main characters from the prequel. However, it is not necessary to have read Destiny of a Jade Bracelet to enjoy the book, as much of the background is explained in the first couple chapters of the book itself, and any other necessary information is explained in the footnotes.
Format
Destiny of a Jade Bracelet was written in a Chinese format called tanci, in which each line is a couplet, where each part of the couplet consists of one of a few formats, ordered by prevalence:
- 7 Chinese characters + 7 (most common)
- 3, 7 + 3, 7
- 3, 3 + 7
- 7 (rare)
Seeking to emulate this style in the unofficial sequel but also to put her own fun spin on it, Chen Duansheng tells the story of Destiny of Rebirth through the voice of a storyteller, who uses three main voices throughout book. The main voice accounts for the bulk of the storytelling and as such follows the tanci format of Destiny of a Jade Bracelet. The second most prevalent voice is narration by the storyteller, in which they typically announce or describe the story they will be telling next. Finally, there are occasionally poems also written in the tanci format mentioned above which summarize previous mentioned plots while sometimes connects to the author’s personal experience of writing the story.
In an effort to preserve the unique tanci format that the book is acclaimed for in Chinese literature, the translation alternates indent levels for each sentence, and uses an em dash after every 3-character structure.
