Love In A Fallen City

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 fatalistic tales of sophisticated women and desperate women bound by family, tradition, and society looking for an escape through education or a love match. On one side there’s claustrophobic family relations and power plays about arranged marriages and which matches will benefit the family most.  Then on the other side there’s opium addicts, illicit love affairs, cocktail parties, and bomb raids. It was a really intriguing mix of invented reality for me to lose myself in.