Started as part of a class for college, finished months later for Women in Translation month.

I thought the book was fine. Like any collection, quality fluctuated pretty wildly depending on which story you were reading. An interesting voice. Unfortunately, my least favorite story was the one translated by Ms. Chang herself. I'm not sure if this was due to the difference in the prose or whether I would have disliked it most no matter the translator, but I thought a story translated by the author herself would be interesting. Ah well. ( )

If I had to class this story collection somewhere, it’d be domestic fiction. The setting for several of these stories is a traditional family house in early 20thC Shanghai (and sometimes Hong Kong), shared by brothers and their wives, with assorted children, servants and slaves. The top couple is either the Patriarch and Matriarch or the eldest brother and his wife, and they rule over a strict downward hierarchy. Deviations from that setting are presented as just that: deviations from the norm.

The foreground of these stories tends to be the inner family life and how the various couples and generations jostle under the same roof, depicted almost as political factions vying for influence. Most of the focus lies on the women in the household -- the wives, adopted daughters, the slaves.

In the background there’s always several tensions: between the old Chinese ways and the new Western-style ways, between the fast-changing morals of the city and the stolid countryside, between societal duties and a longing (articulated or otherwise) for more female self-determination.

Domestic fiction usually isn’t my cup of tea, and while the social machinations held my interest, they didn’t grip me: the perspective was a tad too impersonal. Believe me, these are good stories; I’m glad I read them. But I don’t think I’ll be reading it again. ( )

I wanted to read this because it appeared on the Powell's list of 25 books to read before you die which also includes several of my favourite books.

This is a collection of stories set in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the 30s and 40s. It is rich in local colour and period detail, but I found it a little difficult to warm to, perhaps because the culture Chang describes seems very alien to a modern western eye. ( )

I put this book on my Paperbackswap wishlist ages ago (Probably from an ad in the New York Review of Books). I received it just before my train trip to Virginia, and it seemed like a good travel book, so I brought it along and ended up reading the whole thing on the outbound train. I was right -- it was a good travel book. A collection of short stories taking place in pre-WWII China & Hong Kong, it seemed a backward trip in time, as they were arranged with the most modern storyline first, each following story seeming to progress more into traditional families and characters, though I would guess all took place within a decade or two of each other in time. Although occasionally the narrators were male, the sum effect was a grim picture of the few options open to women in the social roles at the time. One notable exception was the story of a male college student, trapped between the contradictions of his high social class, his shame at his parents' opium addiction, and the abuse suffered at the hands of his father. But even this misery was the result of his mother's entrapment in a loveless marriage, and his tumultuous feelings had disastrous consequences for a female classmate, so perhaps it was the exception that proves the rule. Masterfully written and stereotype-defying, it would be a worthy read for any lover of literature. ( )

This is a collection of short works of fiction, ranging from 15 to 70 pages in length. The setting is the China of Chang’s youth and young adulthood, 1930-1945. The connecting thread is that they all deal with love – enduring, passionate, unrequited – and longing, and pit the traditional values of Chinese culture (honoring family, filial devotion) against the increasing influence from the West to “modernize.” The stories are fraught with sexual tension, moral ambiguity, and pangs of conscience. While they are distinctly Chinese stories, they are universal in their themes.

I particularly liked the title story, set in Shanghai and Hong Kong just before (and during) the Japanese attack in 1941, and Red Rose, White Rose, contrasting one man’s divided loyalties between his “spotless wife” (white rose) and his “passionate mistress” (red rose).

Chang is one of the most well-known and celebrated authors in modern China. Born in 1920 to an aristocratic family in Shanghai she studied literature at the Univ of Hong Kong until 1941, when the Japanese attack on that city forced her to return to Shanghai. Eventually she immigrated to the United States in 1952, where she held various posts as writer-in-residence. In 1969 she obtained a more permanent position as a researcher at Berkeley. Despite a resurgence of interest in her work beginning in the 1970s in Taiwan and Hong Kong (and eventually moving to mainland China), she became ever more reclusive. She was found dead in her apartment in 1995.

The edition I read is translated by Karen S Kingsbury and published by New York Review Books. ( )