Love in a Fallen City

Bai Liusu, divorced and treated by her own Shanghai family as an embarrassment they'd rather not keep feeding, is pushed into a courtship originally meant for her younger sister with Fan Liuyuan, a wealthy, Westernized overseas Chinese playboy with no interest in being tied down. Chang stages their entire Hong Kong courtship, hotel lobbies, dance floors, carefully calibrated jealousy, as a negotiation between two people whose desire is inseparable from their leverage: Liuyuan wants her without the obligation of marriage, and Liusu, with no other route to financial or social security available to a divorced woman in her family's eyes, can't afford to want him back without securing it.

Chang's prose stays clinical about all of this by design, refusing the reader the comfort of reading Liusu and Liuyuan's maneuvering as romance simply delayed. The strategy is the relationship for most of the story's length, right up until the war that neither of them has been paying much attention to arrives at the Repulse Bay Hotel's doorstep and strips away the social theater that had made the standoff possible in the first place.

Chang sets most of the courtship inside Hong Kong's colonial hospitality world, expatriate hotels and dance halls where wealthy Chinese and European guests perform a shared, imported idea of sophistication for each other's benefit. That setting matters to the novella's argument: Liusu and Liuyuan aren't just negotiating with each other, they're negotiating inside a specific, performative colonial social economy that rewards exactly the kind of calculated charm both of them have perfected, which is part of why neither can fully trust what the other one actually feels underneath it.

Chang published this novella in 1943 in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, where she had quickly become one of the era's most read and most controversial writers, not least because of her own relationship soon after with Hu Lancheng, an official who had collaborated with the occupation government. Reading the novella against that biography sharpens its interest in intimacy purchased or secured under conditions neither party fully controls, a subject Chang would go on living out in her own life in ways considerably more compromising than anything she gives Liusu.