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Love in a Fallen City

by Eileen Chang, Karen S. Kingsbury (Translator)

3.94 of 5 stars 3.94 · rating details · 518 ratings · 74 reviews

A New York Review Books Original

“[A] giant of modern Chinese literature” –The New York Times

"With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the f...more

Paperback, 320 pages

Published October 10th 2006 by NYRB Classics (first published 1938)

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Jun 27, 2008 will added it

This was a fascinating read, although I didn't finish a couple of the stories/novellas. Chang's subject is primarily human relationships, more specifically love with its ability to destroy as well as unite, and she approaches them unflinchingly and with a great eye for detail. But she also renders life in Shanghai with such vividness and specificity that the book almost seems to represent her love for the city, theme and form and setting united, etc. Shanghai is presented very much as a boundary...more

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Jun 30, 2012 Motheaten added it · review of another edition

Shelves: asian, fiction

留情/ Mercy: The story starts out with tension between a mature age couple over the issue of the husband's ex-wife. While visiting relatives, the tension gradually eases as the couple is praised, advised, and commented on their close marital relationship. Despite the inevitable conflicts between a couple, at the end of day, what matters is the care and understanding they have for each other, that the marriage may just be more than an economic exchange.

茉莉香片/ Jasmine Tea: A melancholy story in which...more

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Jun 30, 2008 Beth Ann rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: borrowed-from-library

Chang crafted prose full of precise description that is so beautiful and often sad that I hurt to read it. Perhaps that's fitting for a book full of melancholy tales. None of her characters find any lasting happiness. They are separated from others due to gender, class, and time. Men and women are no longer sure of their place in relationships, society, or work. Love affairs bring temporary connections, but no lasting comfort, and often repercussions. A modernizing China offers no guidelines. Ch...more

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Jul 02, 2012 Megan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nyrb, biblioteca

Such gorgeous, gorgeous writing. Definitely love the feeling that you're being told a story rather than reading one (ie. Chang starts off her first two tales by implementing the burning of incense or brewing tea and when you've finised them you're left feeling hazy about your own future or feeling bitter about certain circumstances in your own life.) Going to eventually check out more of her works.

for a more thorough review

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Mar 23, 2009 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, translated, owned

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Feb 17, 2013 Mizuki Genshou rated it 5 of 5 stars

Love In a Fallen City is a collection of Chang's most well known novella: Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier, Love In a Fallen City, The Golden Cangue, Sealed Off and Red Rose, White Rose. So fine are these stories, I suggest that if you planned to read only one single book by Chinese female author for once in your entire life, read Love In the Fallen City. This book is no doubt the best of the very best which had ever been penned by a Chinese female author. Although I admit some readers might...more Love In a Fallen City is a collection of Chang's most well known novella: Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier, Love In a Fallen City, The Golden Cangue, Sealed Off and Red Rose, White Rose. So fine are these stories, I suggest that if you planned to read only one single book by Chinese female author for once in your entire life, read Love In the Fallen City. This book is no doubt the best of the very best which had ever been penned by a Chinese female author. Although I admit some readers might need time to grow fond of Miss Chang's novellas.

Miss Chang's works would also give you much insight on ordinary Chinese people, their everyday affairs and the modern Chinese middle class society in the 1940 era. (PS: Miss Chang was a young lady in her 20s when she published her most successful short stories in the wartime Shanghai)

Many readers might mistake Miss Chang's short stories as 'romance' because most of them deal with relationship between Chinese men and women in the 1940s Shanghai city, and Miss Chang's works shows a heavy influence from Chinese romance classic such as The Story Of a Stone (also named Dream of the Red Chamber). But in fact disillusion of romantic love, family relationship and friendship seem to be a more common and dominating theme for Miss Chang's novellas.

The titled act Love In a Fallen City, considered by many as one of Miss Chang's masterpieces, is also one of the few Chang's stories to have a slightly happier ending. The heroine was the divorced daughter from a decaying Shanghai family, her 'love interest' a wealthy playboy who refused to settle down. The author told us: "She was but a selfish woman, he was just a selfish man". She was looking for a way out from her family and a meal ticket, he only wanted good company and a good time in Hong Kong, but as Hong Kong came under Japanese army's attack, their feeling toward each other started to change. In my opinion, Love In a Fallen City is a 'game of love' in every sense, the author successfully created a heroine who was down-to-earth, clever, cucalative, fraigle and sympathetic at the same time.

Some other reader might also mistake Miss Chang for a feminist author, but please make no mistake here. Although Miss Chang would no doubt agree with many things feminists have to say about gender equality, but readers must bear in mind that many, if not most female characters in Chang's novellas are no feminists. Although many of Chang's female characters are determined and strong-willed, still hardly any of them show awareness or try to fight against the social and cultural inequality. Instead of showing awareness or independence, Miss Chang's female characters display different levels of mental and/or material dependence, on their male counterparts. From time to time, such kind of male and female's relationship is pretty painful to look at, but there's no denying Miss Chang's description of relationship is quite a realistic one.

Therefore it's refreshing to see among the crew of suppressed, struggling female characters, Wang Jiaorui, a married woman in Red Rose, White Rose, who was cruelly abandoned by the lover of her extra-marital affair, eventually raised up from humiliation and became a stronger person in the end.

Miss Chang's works always show a deep understanding on human nature and relationships, which helps to put insight into her novellas and help them raised from mere romance to worthy literature which are still widely admired and recognized decades after her passing. (less)

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Dec 22, 2012 Stephen rated it 3 of 5 stars

I admire Eileen Chang's writing. She occupies an important place in the history of twentieth century Chinese literature. And yet, when I finished this excellent collection of some of her most acclaimed stories, I found that the plots and characters quickly fading from my mind. Just two or three days after finishing, I am hard-pressed to summarize coherently any of the six or seven stories in this book. This is strange because as I am reading Chang I invariably feel she quite brilliantly captures...more

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Oct 12, 2010 Susan rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've seen the movie of one of the novellas in this collection, but that was years ago and my memory doesn't always serve me well. So it was like I heard the story for the first time. I just love this book and all the short stories/novellas the editor chose. Most of the stories are translated by Karen Kingsbury, but one was even translated by Chang herself, who wrote in both Chinese and English. I particularly loved the stories "Love in Fallen City" and "Red Rose, White Rose", which is the movie...more

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Oct 23, 2009 Mitzi rated it 4 of 5 stars

I'm not sure how this title ended up on my To Read list, but I'm glad it did. This was a collection of novellas and short stories by Eileen Chang, well known in China, but not in America, although she moved here in her 30's. All of the stories deal with love, marriage, and money or stature. I imagined she was China's Jane Austen, though the mood tends to be darker, and the endings don't always end happily--so perhaps it would be better to compare her to Edith Wharton.
I have to admit it wasn't t...more

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Sep 20, 2011 Patrick McCoy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, classics

Eileen Chan is best known for the naughty film version of her novel Lust, Caution directed by Ang Lee. However, I was intrigued by what I had read about her books before that production saw the light of day. But I didn’t get around to reading her short story collection, Love In A Fallen City, until I had already seen the infamous film version. Nonetheless, I found this collection of stories taking place in Hong Kong during the war or after the war very intriguing and exotic. These were fatalisti...more

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Sep 24, 2011 Meghan Fidler rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is my first experience with Ms. Eileen Chang. I would recommend others to experience Ms. Chang too.
By far the most intriguing elements of these stories were her descriptive terms. From "chicken fat yellow" to the "small, solid gold pendants of her earrings like two brass nails nailing her to the door, a butterfly specimen in a glass box, bright-colored and desolate," the essence of her powers of attribution is worth study.

In her own introduction to the text, Chang explains that "In the s...more This is my first experience with Ms. Eileen Chang. I would recommend others to experience Ms. Chang too.
By far the most intriguing elements of these stories were her descriptive terms. From "chicken fat yellow" to the "small, solid gold pendants of her earrings like two brass nails nailing her to the door, a butterfly specimen in a glass box, bright-colored and desolate," the essence of her powers of attribution is worth study.

In her own introduction to the text, Chang explains that "In the savage wilderness, the woman who comes to power is not, as most people imagine, a wild rose with big, black, burning eyes, stronger than a man, whip in hand, ready to strike at any moment. That's just a fantasy made up by city-fold in need of new stimulation. In the wilderness that is coming, among the shards and rubble, only the painted-lady type from "Hop Hop" opera, this kind of woman, can carry on with simple ease. Her home is everywhere, in any era, in any society."

The double thread of woman-as-seen and woman-as-is [or, perhaps, women-who-can-be] permeate the stories in this text. Most have a dark, if silky, underlining. Indeed, the first two stories are about the coming of age of a young woman, in Aloeswood Incense, and young man, in Jasmine Tea. While detailed with images like "But her heart had slipped away from Liang and Lu as lightly as a dragonfly grazes the water, before carelessly flying off somewhere. Aunt and niece had each invited an invisible guest: since there really were four at table, it was a most companionable meal[.]", the relationships fettered out in all these narratives are best described by the young protagonist from Aloeswood: "Fair? There's no such thing as 'fair' in relationships between people."

Indeed, by highlighting the emotional history of each character alongside future desires, the ability to overcome personal qualms and honestly connect with another person requires a war [literally in Love in a Fallen City]. In this way Chang is a brilliant representation of the ways which family, society and desires of wealth leave almost insurmountable blocks to love. Even between children and parents, as exemplified in Jasmine Tea and The Golden Cangue, these relationships should not be taken as a given. Chang even finds ways to describe the experience of self-crippling in Red Rose, White Rose.

Such descriptions of love as pain leave me wondering how such vivid inspirations were drawn from the author's own experience.
Now I need a biography of Eileen Chang. (less)

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Feb 02, 2013 Ruby Oh rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's almost unbearable to just sit here and read through (some)those infuriatingly ignorant reviews, which insolently neglects the beauty of Chang's work.

Chinese is indeed very different from English,I understand that a lot could be lost in translation, but what the readers should really be doing is BACKGROUND RESEARCH.Have you ever heard of the phrase"Brevity is the soul of wit". Chang write short stories, but every single word she mustered, along with the title, YES THE TITLE(every single titl...more

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Apr 13, 2011 Gordon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Eileen Chang did a remarkable job at expressing the unique gender differences, positions, and expectations in The Golden Cangue. This is the only section of the book that I have read, and it was recommended to me, and now I see why. Being unfamiliar with past Chinese culture, one can really gain an understanding on how difficult it was to be a woman in a male dominated society in past China. Because the protagonist is a woman, and since Chang is a woman, the reader really gets a sense of how the...more

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Sep 20, 2011 Emily rated it 5 of 5 stars

Eileen Chang's nearly poetic prose is what drew me to the writings in this book. She has such a command of language use and her short stories often evoke sadness. The short story "Sealed Off" and the novella "The Golden Cangue" were both extraordinary. Through subtle interaction between characters, Chang can create a real tone of sadness in the reader. In "Sealed Off", the tramcar and the shut down city serves as an extended metaphor throughout the story. The contrast of the tramcar in motion ve...more

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Oct 26, 2012 Margaret rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 20th-century-literature, literature, nyrb, read-fall-2012, chinese

The four novellas and two short stories in this collection of Eileen Chang's work illustrate Hong Kong in the middle of the 20th century. The translator makes a point in the introduction that while many other authors were banned in mainland China for portraying strong political opinions, Chang avoids the opinions and the banning. What Chang's sampling of work in this collection lacks in outright political tone is made up by the twisted and complicated relationships between characters. At times t...more

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Jun 02, 2011 Lorraine rated it 5 of 5 stars

An anthology of 20th century Chinese stories. She has only recently been discovered by American readers. Her stories take place primarily in the 1940s in Shanghai or Hong Kong. I am so happy to have discovered her so I can broaden my understanding of Chinese culture. All of the stories, but one has been translated from Chinese. "The Golden Cangue" was translated by her.

The Golden Cangue examines the life of a woman who is forced by her family into a loveless marriage. She grows mad after years...more

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Nov 22, 2011 Sasha Martinez added it

Shelves: books-read-in-2011, nyrb-classics

One of the first NYRB Classics I heard of—in tandem with John Williams’ Stoner —was Eileen Chang’s collection of novellas Love in a Fallen City. My bibliophilic enabler Aunt Anne sent me this book late last year, and it’s taken me this long to settle down and read it. And, you know, it was awesome.

For purposes of brevity [sorely lacking in my corner of the internet], this post is going to focus on the title novella. Which is, well, one of the best nerve-wracking, most quietly and dignifiedly ten...more

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May 06, 2008 Ann M rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: did-not-finish

Why is everyone bitter and horrible in Chinese stories? I read one story, Jasmine Tea, which has nothing to do with Jasmine Tea.

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Feb 07, 2008 Jenn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Borrowed this from the library after seeing Lust, Caution. She's bleak, very bleak.

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Jul 21, 2011 Jenny rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: setting, subject-matter

I wanted to like this book more than I actually did because a) she’s a female Chinese writer b) writing during the first half of the 20th century c) while China was under Japanese rule and Shanghai and Hong Kong are crumbling around her. But her writing style was too halting and abrupt for my taste (I don’t know how much of it is in the translation). All I know is events and plot move too quickly with little time for character development. A lot of people die very quickly and as the body count r...more I wanted to like this book more than I actually did because a) she’s a female Chinese writer b) writing during the first half of the 20th century c) while China was under Japanese rule and Shanghai and Hong Kong are crumbling around her. But her writing style was too halting and abrupt for my taste (I don’t know how much of it is in the translation). All I know is events and plot move too quickly with little time for character development. A lot of people die very quickly and as the body count rises, I’m trying to remember who is who. “The Golden Cangue” was trying to do too much too quickly and as a result felt way too long if that makes sense.

Her portrayal of women doesn’t sit well with me. They’re either dragon ladies ruthless in their pursuits, silent pretty young things, or very petty and ignorant. Perhaps this was her reality but I couldn’t help but feel she was sensationalizing a little. Quotes like this got my ire up: “No matter how amazing a woman is, she won’t be respected by her own sex unless she’s loved by a member of the opposite one. Women are petty this way” (127). Not that I’m faulting her for not being more feminist but it was hard for me to swallow. The best stories are “Aloeswood Incense” and “Love in a Fallen City”. The female protagonists were the least objectionable and there was more character development and the love story seemed more plausible.

For me, the most interesting parts of the book are the struggles between East and West which almost always means Traditional vs. Modern. And it was also fascinating to learn about race restrictions in colonial Hong Kong and to see that tension between Chinese people who were able to live abroad versus those that never left, and the view of mixed race women. At first, I thought Chang was assuming West/Modern > East/Traditional but then I read something like this: “She was a good daughter, a good student. All the people in her family were good people. They took baths every day; they read the newspaper every day. When they turned on the radio, they never listened to local folk opera, comic opera, that sort of thing, just symphonies by Beethoven or Wagner; they didn’t understand what they were listening to, but they listened anyway. In this world, there are more good people than real people…Cuiyuan wasn’t very happy” (241).

The common theme among the stories is people want to be loved but don’t know how to love. Sometimes they’re thwarted by familial obligations or lack of agency and most relationships seem loveless and for the sake of propriety. She seemed a bit of a moralist and was really critiquing the lives of the upper and upper middle-classes. They have pretty messed up lives. Or it may have even been a critique of traditional upper class households. Those houses seemed to be full of drug addicts, womanizers, indolent men, and gamblers and their legacies (money, genes, social status) are evaporating like so much opium smoke.(less)

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Aug 09, 2007 Kate Levin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Beautiful but cold.

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May 17, 2013 Matteo Cavelier rated it 5 of 5 stars

This powerful collection of short stories by the "fallen star of Chinese literature" is a must-read for serious readers who like a literary challenge.
Chang touches upon some of the most marked juxtapositions of 20th century China, mainly the contrast between East and West and that between traditional and modern, in many of her stories in this book. She provides an interesting take on the rapid societal change and "europeanization" of China in the 1920s, where many of her characters try to achiev...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Emily Wilkerson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: for-class

I had to read "Love in a Fallen City" and "Red Rose, White Rose" for the East-West unit in my comparative literature class and I loved them so much that I had to read the rest of the collection. What I find most appealing about her writing is affinity for beautiful, evocative descriptions that feel like literary candy. I tend to dog-ear pages with quotes that I like and so much of this book is dog-eared because of passages like this one from "Red Rose, What Rose:" "She was wearing a long dress t...more I had to read "Love in a Fallen City" and "Red Rose, White Rose" for the East-West unit in my comparative literature class and I loved them so much that I had to read the rest of the collection. What I find most appealing about her writing is affinity for beautiful, evocative descriptions that feel like literary candy. I tend to dog-ear pages with quotes that I like and so much of this book is dog-eared because of passages like this one from "Red Rose, What Rose:" "She was wearing a long dress that trailed on the floor, a dress of such intense, fresh, and wet green that anything it touched turned the same color. When she moved a little, the air was streaked with green... Looked at too long, those eye-popping colors would prove blinding."

The comp lit student/translator in me is also fascinated by her choice of subject matter, mostly people who have been uprooted or lack a singular identity. For the most part, her characters struggle with traditionalism and modernism. They don't know which language to speak in, they can't communicate with each other, and they don't know how to define themselves. In, "Sealed Off," which might be my favorite story in the collection, Chang writes that "Life is like the Bible, translated from Hebrew to Greek, from Greek to Latin, from Latin to English, from English to Mandarin Chinese. When Cuiyan read it, she translated it the Mandarin to Shanghainese. Some things did not come through." Although I don't know much about Chinese history, this book made me want to learn more about it so that I can understand what these characters are experiencing in a historical sense.

The only reason I'm not giving Love in a Fallen City five stars is that I couldn't get into "The Golden Cangue" at all. It was one of the longest stories in the book (a novella really) and the least compelling for me. Interestingly enough, it was translated by Eileen Chang herself, which makes me think that she is not a particularly good translator of her own work, whereas the rest of the stories were translated by Karen S. Kingsbury. I don't want to knock Chang too much though, because this story also had a lot of characters that I could not keep straight at all and that prevented me from enjoying the story, regardless of the quality of the translation.(less)

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Aug 23, 2012 Amy Do rated it 4 of 5 stars

Chang's stories are dynamic and panoramic. Her characters are moving, interesting, alive and multi-dimensional, often passionate and unpredictable. They are believable and understandable even though they come from a different culture and time than most of us. The stories's settings are exotic and unique, often in Shanghai and Hongkong around the years of transitioning to more Westernized cities. The endings are often bittersweet. The language soft and calm. The clever descriptions short, selecti...more Chang's stories are dynamic and panoramic. Her characters are moving, interesting, alive and multi-dimensional, often passionate and unpredictable. They are believable and understandable even though they come from a different culture and time than most of us. The stories's settings are exotic and unique, often in Shanghai and Hongkong around the years of transitioning to more Westernized cities. The endings are often bittersweet. The language soft and calm. The clever descriptions short, selective and beautiful. Chang's command of fiction is masterful; her keen observation of the changing society is transformed flawlessly into stories of China's volatile time periods, with people struggling to make decisions, to love and live in a shattering environments.

There are many things I love about Chang's stories: the setting, the characters and the writing.

The China that Chang describes in her stories is beautiful as I would imagine from Chinese ink paintings: "already, beyond the wall a roar of wild azaleas was blooming across the hill, the fiery red stomping through brittle grass, blazing down the mountainside." The flowers, the tea, incense, mountains create a romantic dreamy backdrop for Chang's stories. But there are also Western theaters, dance halls, beaches, trams, crowded cities. Chang's world is fiercely aristocratic and considerably wealthy, with traditional values still strictly in place with the Confucianist familial hierarchy, at the same time, also allows people to fall in love, to marry, to have affairs, to divorce, to go against families for one's happiness. However, Chang's setting is not messy, chaotic, broken, but rather liquid, changing, unsettling, creating the perfect background for Chang's memorable characters.

They are often fierce and passionate. They learn to love with a naive mind or broken hearts, or both. These characters define their own kind of 'love': the "red rose" love, the "white rose" love (Red Rose, White Rose), the "Wei-long-innocent-adolescent-sweet" kind of love (Aloeswood Incense), the "love in a fallen city" kind of love. And then there is also hate, the twisted, suppressed, confused hate of a young man struggling to face his emotions and lie up to his parents' expectations (Jasmine Tea). These characters glow with passion and motivation; they are individuals finding their own path, making their own families and culture while the world around them changes. What I love most about them is their eager to fight for their own life: Weilong setting out on her own to create the life she always wanted, Liusu and Liuyuan rising from the debris of the bombed Hong Kong to create a marriage for themselves. These new and modern men and women of the changing China constantly come to terms with their feelings and decisions and respond to changing circumstances with logic and determinism.

Chang uses her beautiful language to bring the setting, characters and stories to life. For me, language-wise, "Sealed-off" is the most successful story in the collection. Chang uses sound, colors, motions masterfully to describe an encounter between people on a crowded train. The invisible human connection and the internal psychological feedback mechanisms are highlighted cleverly and realistically. Chang's writing echoes the nostalgia of classical literature and adopts modern techniques into one unique and genius style of her own. (less)

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Nov 21, 2010 Danica rated it 3 of 5 stars

I re-read this on a recommendation from a friend, and although I came away with a clearer understanding of what transpired in certain pieces (Love in a Fallen City, The Golden Canque), I had the same problem sustaining interest in the stories as I did two summers ago. Once again, a translation problem? The style is poetic at first but tiresome after a certain period of time, mostly because the poetics of Chang's writing style (at least in translation) lies not in its precision, i.e. of unearthin...more I re-read this on a recommendation from a friend, and although I came away with a clearer understanding of what transpired in certain pieces (Love in a Fallen City, The Golden Canque), I had the same problem sustaining interest in the stories as I did two summers ago. Once again, a translation problem? The style is poetic at first but tiresome after a certain period of time, mostly because the poetics of Chang's writing style (at least in translation) lies not in its precision, i.e. of unearthing a strikingly lyrical or apt description for a grove of trees or a state of mind, but in its sheer volume-minded approach to writing purdy prose, i.e. by comparing everything even remotely and/or traditionally poetic to [her heroine's face][the romantic mist enshrouding the crumbling old estate][the caddishness of certain unchivalrous suitors][the agony of unrequited love].

Another thing that may have been lost in translation = the ease with which said heroines fall in love. I mean, these girls trip over themselves to get all googly-eyed over dudes, which is not a bad thing in and of itself, seeing how this theme does constitute one of Chang's most important concerns (i.e the central and crucial tension between maintaining a 'true' female selfhood and losing it down the rabbit-hole of fulfilling the many duties -- to husband, to children, to mother-in-law -- that follow from the 'female' appellation in 1930s China). The main problem is that it's difficult to believe their girlish obsessions, their tragic pronouncements of devotion and longing, when the build-up for every relationship follows the same, essential, fixed-line trajectory (meet-up, exchange of dialogue, brooding conducted in darkened rooms, sudden declaration of passionate and inexplicable love, followed by a veritable shitstorm of enraged relatives because oh shit! girl you just sold out your only viable commodity to a stone cold loser and he didn't even propose). Or rather, the details are bland and the text does a poor job of situating the reader in an imagined environment where it is, yes, incumbent on us to believe that girl A loves boy B because there are no indications whatsoever that have occurred beforehand that would imply such a state of affairs. Character development and not effing up verisimilitude go a long way. In sum, the tensions addressed by Chang in these novellas -- tradition vs. western modernism, female independence vs. love -- are truly interesting, even extremely relevant, but the packaging is less than convincing. For a better rendered treatment of some of the same themes (esp. female independence vs. love and the problems faced by the Chinese middle to upper classes during the political maelstroms of the early 20th century) I think Lan Samantha Chang's Inheritance does much, much better.(less)

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Dec 04, 2009 Dewey Norton rated it 3 of 5 stars

Brilliantly written, deep insight into the charater of the people in the stories, but all are about people who are deeply troubled in life and all the stories have a sad ending, like Richard Ford in these respects. No real insight into what was happening politically in the fallen city, or what being in a fallen city meant, evidently so that she would not incur the wrath of the Japanese occupation including her husband, an administrator for the Japanese.

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Jun 24, 2009 Louise rated it 3 of 5 stars

Eileen Chang connects this collection of short stories together by the common theme of troubled relationships. The turmoil of the relationships in these stories mirror the changes taking part in China during that time.

While I always felt a sense of dread when starting each new story, knowing that it'll never end in happily ever after, I was also eager to see what twists and turns the characters would go through in their quest for love.

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May 10, 2012 Leslie Shimotakahara rated it 4 of 5 stars

Just finished reading Love in a Fallen City, while I was travelling in Hong Kong ... It was particularly delightful to read Eileen Chang's famous novella while visiting the Repulse Bay Hotel in Hong Kong, where the piece is set ... My full review can be read at www.the-reading-list.com

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Apr 09, 2009 Wes rated it 5 of 5 stars

Eileen Chang writes from a feminine perspective with an eye for the truth about love, usually doomed by external circumstances that go largely unseen. She focuses on people and everyday life yet somehow evokes the real feeling of the period (and those unseen external circumstances). Her often hard-to-accept truths will cut your heart more than break it. But you'll be convinced. She herself has an interesting background, too.

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Sep 25, 2012 Shana rated it 2 of 5 stars

I’m not usually a short story kind of person but as you can see, I’ve been trying to give them a try. Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang (translated by Karen S. Kingsbury) had a few gems but some of the stories I had to skip over after reading a few pages. My favorites were probably the first two. They’re kind of hard to understand if you don’t have a good amount of background knowledge of Hong Kong, for example.

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About Eileen Chang

Eileen Chang (pinyin: Zhang Ailing, traditional Chinese: 張愛玲) was born to a prominent family in Shanghai (one of her great-grandfathers was Li Hongzhang) in 1920.

She went to a prestigious girls' school in Shanghai, where she changed her name from Zhang Ying to Zhang Ailing to match her English name, Eileen. Afterwards, she attended the University of Hong Kong, but had to go back to Shanghai when H...more

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Books by Eileen Chang

Lust, Caution and Other Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)

Red Rose, White Rose (Penguin Mini Modern Classics)

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189123.Love_in_a_Fallen_City?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320400912l/189123.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189123.Love_in_a_Fallen_City?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang[/url]

Love in a Fallen City

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