title: Love in a Fallen City (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Eileen Chang
description: <I>Starred Review.</i> Chang died in 1995 in Los Angeles, having emigrated to the U.S. in 1955 at 35. These six stories, most available in English for the first time, were published to acclaim in China and Hong Kong in the '40s; they explore, bewitchingly, the myriad ways love overcomes (or doesn't) the intense social constraints of time and place. In the compact "Sealed Off," Shanghai briefly shuts down in defense against a blockade, and strangers on a tram allow their inner yearnings to surface, with consequences at once momentous and static. In the layered title story, a couple taunt each other with false estrangements as they fall in love, then are forced to confront one another directly through wartime privations. The startling novella "The Golden Cangue," told with upstairs-downstairs shifts in perspective, fugues around a wife, resentful of her disabled husband and reviled by his family, who seeks reassurance in opium. In these eloquent tragedies, Chang plunges readers <I>in medias res</I>. She expertly burdens her characters with failed dreams and stifled possibilities, leads them to push aside the heavy curtains of family and convention, and then shows them a yawning emptiness. Their different responses are brilliantly underplayed and fascinating. <I>(Nov.)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Eileen Chang
  
  LUST, CAUTION
  
  Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) was born in Shanghai, China, in 1920. She studied
  literature at the University of Hong Kong but in 1941, during the Japanese
  occupation, she returned to Shanghai, where she published Romances (1944) and
  Written on Water (1945), which established her reputation as a literary star.
  She moved to Hong Kong in 1952 and in 1955 to the United States, where she
  continued to write. She died in Los Angeles in 1995.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > ALSO BY EILEEN CHANG
  
  > Love in a Fallen City
  
  > The Rouge of the North
  
  > Written on Water
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Contents
  
  [Cover](Chan_9780307487780_epub_cvi_r1.htm)
  
  [About the Author](index_split_000.html#filepos172)
  
  [Other Books By This Author](index_split_001.html#filepos974)
  
  [Title Page](Chan_9780307487780_epub_tp_r1.htm)
  
  [Forward](index_split_003.html#filepos2217)
  
  [Chapter 1](index_split_005.html#filepos19846)
  
  [Afterward](index_split_006.html#filepos91715)
  
  [Why Did She Do It?](index_split_007.html#filepos95196)
  
  [Copyr