HeadInTheClouds:
Does anyone remember if there is an interview where TH promising a different ending for LYF to made up for the ending of Once Promised? Or the one where she talked about wanting to change XL's ending, but realised that she couldn't?
I'm not sure if these are my imagination or if they are real.
One of the challenges of tracing back what Tong Hua said, particularly on Weibo is that her account post display has been limited to the last 6 months, and she has not been posting on her account for a long time, which is a real shame because it would have been such a treat to go through her thoughts prior to and after the publication of the novel itself. I do remember reading previously on Weibo (honestly can't remember where though) that someone spoke of how Tong Hua once said that she tried to make Xiang Liu the endgame, but in the end, the characters wrote themselves as she got to know them more, and the story turned out the way it did.
Certainly, in her 2019 interview on 书生说 Scholar Speaks, she said this:
During the creative process, do you work out in advance the ending of each character?
I normally do not write an outline for my stories, which means I myself actually have no idea how the character would end. As I write, it's sometimes based on my own deeper understanding of the characters or like being pushed. Or perhaps sometimes it's the character who guides you slowly towards the end of his fate. So it is not deliberate, but a natural progression.
and she herself expressed grief over Xiang Liu's fate in her Weibo post early 2012, before the novel was published:
Coming out from the supermarket, the wind was strong and the sun was bright. Through the car window, I saw that the blue skies were really blue and the white clouds were really white. I thought of Nine Lives (a character in a story), all dressed in white, living nine lives in the mortal realm, a demon who should have been so unfettered and free but instead trapped himself with responsibility. I always love to use the snow to describe him. Just as I was feeling sad, it suddenly started snowing, and the snowflakes hit against the car window. I was shocked! The sun was clearly still shining brightly. My husband said, "Sunny and snowing! It's a rare occurrence!"
-- 桐华tonghua @ Weibo, 26 Feb 2012
What she did say in interviews circa 2019 (including Scholar Speaks and Sohu) about Once Promised as opposed to Lost You Forever was that she considered Once Promised a tragedy, but not Lost You Forever, because in the latter, everyone found their proper place in life, and obtained what they wished for, and achieved what they wanted most. I think therein lies her intent - to differentiate between the two works. From the same Sohu interview:
MT: Having published so many works that readers know and love so well, how do you avoid falling into a rut or a similar style?
TH: I feel that my stories will definitely be confined within my own thoughts and ideas, with traces of myself in it which cannot be completely eradicated. I do not deliberately avoid falling into a similar pattern, but I do "love what is new, and dislike the old". Each story I am inspired to write is due to the fact that there is something refreshing in it.