5 ideas
In 'Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream,' Madame Qian, a former kunqu opera singer and widow of a Nationalist general, attends a banquet in Taipei hosted by a woman who has kept her wealth. When she is asked to sing the famous aria 'Wandering in the Garden,' the music pulls her back to a Nanjing affair from before 1949, and her voice fails. The episode shows exile as the collapse of a person's ability to perform the identity her old status rested on.
In 'Winter Nights,' Professor Yu Qinlei, poor, lame and stuck teaching in Taipei, is visited by his old classmate Wu Zhuguo, now a celebrated scholar based in America. Both men took part in the 1919 May Fourth student protests.
Yin Xueyan, the ageless Shanghai hostess of 'The Eternal Snow Beauty,' rebuilds her old Shanghai salon in Taipei with the same food, mahjong and manners. Displaced elites gather there to act out their former rank. Her unchanging beauty represents the fantasy that the past can be kept intact, while the men drawn to her keep being ruined, which shows how the preserved past consumes those who depend on it.
Each story takes a different social stratum: generals, society ladies, professors, dance-hall hostesses, servants and old soldiers. Seen together, the stories show that the fall of 1949 was not one shared loss. Each class lost a different kind of thing, whether rank, a lover, a voice, a cause or a home village, and each copes with the tools its class allows.
The collection argues that the exiles' loyalty to pre-1949 China keeps them from living in the present. They keep their old titles, rituals and memories intact, but this keeps them in a suspended state where they are unable to grieve and unable to adapt. The characters who fare worst are the ones most faithful to what was lost.