Love in a Fallen City

I read Love in a Fallen City and the Golden Cangue for class and loved both of them. I read the rest later and enjoyed them as well. I preferred the stories that focused on women, as the male perspectives were often much more unpleasant, which I guess makes sense. Aloeswood Incense, Love in a Fallen City, and The Golden Cangue were definitely my favorites. All three were wonderful. I also enjoyed the story Sealed Off, although it was quite short. The other two, Jasmine Tea and Red Rose, White Rose weren't necessarily bad but both had protagonists that were rude, unpleasant, and unkind to women. That's not to say the stories were bad or that the characters were poorly written. I think the way Eileen Chang writes about people is very show more believable, but that doesn't make the perspectives of unlikable characters any more pleasant to read. Overall though, as a collection I think all the stories were good and the collection is cohesive. All the stories and all the relationships within them are sad in some way. The way in which Eileen Chang writes love and despair and heartbreak is really profound. All of her stories feel tangibly real and there's something beautiful about them. I also think that my experience reading two of them in class was really beneficial because I didn't know much about this period in Chinese history at the time and although that knowledge isn't necessary to understand these stories (they really feel timeless), I think it was helpful context. show less

Although Chang carried on writing long after her move to the US, it's these cynical, pessimistic love stories from the thirties and early forties that she's best known for. The combination of the narrator's unromantic view of human nature with languid tropical backgrounds in the prosperous suburbs of Shanghai and Hong Kong makes you think of Somerset Maugham, but Chang complicates that mix further by bringing in her own experience of growing up in an upper-class Chinese family torn between extreme conservatism and the fashion for adopting Western styles of behaviour, dress and ethics. Each of the stories in this collection takes characters exposed to these forces in different combinations and ratios, and we get to see young people show more making a mess of their lives (and others) irrespective of whether it's in pursuit of money, love, pleasure, or career. Beautifully done, and there's always a strong sense that the European cocktail-cabinet culture is jut as doomed as the lifestyle of the wealthy families where the mother-in-law squelches the least sign of independence from any of her sons' wives. But you also get the feeling that Chang would be pretty good at squelching upstarts herself! show less

More emphasis on “fallen” than on “love”-- which is exactly what I like to read about! I loved getting a glimpse into the lives of the richly-depicted but utterly miserable characters in each of these stories. Chang’s settings are lush and evocative and she masterfully unravels devastating stories with a lethal poker face. Need to read more!

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 show more 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. show less

4.5/5

In China, as elsewhere, the constraints imposed by the traditional moral code were originally constructed for the benefit of women: they made beautiful women even harder to obtain, so their value rose, and ugly women were spared the prospect of never-ending humiliation. Women nowadays don't have this kind of protective buffer, especially not mixed-blood girls, whose status is entirely undefined.

I love Pearl S. Buck, I really do, but the way her written legacy interfered with that of Eileen Chang's is a tragedy. Readers introduced through the Nobel Prize Winner to China would expect exacting honor, high drama, sultry romance, any other conjunction of the profligating misnomer known as the 'East'; even more absurd a concept when said show more readers are US bound and must look to the west for their fill of fiction. They would not have been satisfied with these short and biting works, bred on an entirely different culture with strains more akin to Fitzgerald and O'Connor than anything the historical fiction trends of the States could conjure up. And so we left yet another author to their own devices, till when dead and gone we could sift through and lift up their works in as fitting a posthumous manner as we please.

A bitter triumph both here and across the sea, for as an expatriate Chang was unjustly ignored, the only alternative to a home country banning. You'll find very little of such unsavory politickings here, an authorial choice that let her works alone before the government shifted and her wealthy background combined with lack of polemical interests chased her from Shanghai to Hong Kong and finally to LA to die alone in an apartment within my lifetime. It's a flavor of acrid living that she captured on paper even in her youthful twenties, as these stories are happiness of the trained sort, gilded robes and bound feet reminiscent of ruffled skirts and excised ribs in the land of Christians and their Boxer Rebellion. True, Shanghai is not Paris or London, Berlin or New York, but you don't need white people to play out the conflicts of modern life on a theme of hope and decadence, luxurious backdrops galore to the young choking on the old, women flying too far to forget the taste when time comes for men to clip their wings.

There's beauty, though, unfamiliar enough for me to spend a moment unraveling the colors and densities, landscapes heated to a different symphony of flora and fauna, living spaces enclosed within collections of wood and stone whose recognition comes only through many a visit to the houses of my friends, here in the Bay Area where the high school classes are 18% 'Caucasian' and the vernacular of ABC (American Born Chinese), banana (yellow on the out, white on the in), and egg (you get the picture) were the norm on campus grounds. This mix and meld of upbringing made me wish once to follow said friends on one of their summer retreats to kith and kin, a wish revitalized by what I knew within these pages and the far more that I didn't. I know my poor head for languages too well to ever hope to grasp the five thousand plus characters of the Chinese language, but the excursion would provide sorely needed grounding of contextual reality for my abstract intake, if nothing else. That, and reading The Story of the Stone, whose pervasive influence apparent even in this literature of the 20th century has shoved it forward a few hundred in the shelves.

The white Liang mansion was melting viscously into the white mist, leaving only the greenish gleam of the lamplight shining through square after square of the green windowpanes, like ice cubes in peppermint schnapps. When the fog thickened, the ice cubes dissolved, and the lights went out.

Keep an eye on that NYRB cover, Ah Xian's China, China: Bust 34 in profile. It conveys the book better than I ever could. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Eileen Chang's stories are all beautiful in their own way.
Aloeswood Incense was perhaps my least favorite- but it's an important telling of life and times of some people. Jasmine Tea stayed with me for a long time with the feeling of how long and how much can one year for an ideal family. Sealed off is a little, almost dystopic fantasy in a little time point during what seems like a curfew. Red Rose, white rose is very uncomfortable to read as a woman, and yet so human. There is also something utterly memorable about the Golden Cangue- the character of Chi-chiao couldn't have been better described as having worn a 'golden cangue' and yet, her pain when Chi-tse leaves is hard to look away from for the reader.
Love in a fallen city is show more perhaps my favourite, that description of the lovers in despair in the fallen city and the victory of Liusu in the end of the story- like that of legendary beauties who felled cities. show less