Love in a Fallen City

Chang's Hong Kong is a colonial stage set for a courtship: the terrace and lawns of the Repulse Bay Hotel, the beaches of the south side, the ferries and hotels between Central and Kowloon. A divorced Shanghai woman and a Shanghai-born playboy circle each other through it until the Japanese invasion of December 1941 brings the whole set crashing down and, in the ruins, makes their bargain real. The old Bai house in Shanghai frames the story at either end.

Bai Liusu

The Bai family house, Shanghai

Opening frame

The story opens in the crowded, fading house of the Bai family, where a divorced daughter is treated as a burden and a reproach. The pressure of that household is what sends her chasing a match in Hong Kong. The old town of Shanghai stands in for the kind of traditional gentry home the family occupies.

Opening section

inferred The Bai house is a fictional home of a declining gentry family; Chang gives no address, so this marks the old walled-city quarter of Shanghai as a representative point for such a household. It sits outside the Hong Kong setting on purpose, as the frame the story opens and closes with.

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