Jasmine Tea

About

In 1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong, Eileen Chang maps the quiet cruelties of domestic life with the precision of a jeweller examining a cracked stone. This collection gathers three of her finest stories: “Jasmine Tea,” in which a meek student trapped between his domineering father and his mentor’s capricious daughter attempts a desperate, futile act of escape; “The Golden Cangue,” widely considered her masterpiece, where a woman married into wealth and misery destroys her own children to maintain control; and “Traces of Love,” a wartime portrait of a woman learning to live inside an imperfect marriage. Chang writes about women’s constrained choices with devastating coolness — no sentimentality, no rescue, just the slow mathematics of who holds power and who pays for it. She is one of the twentieth century’s great prose stylists, and these stories show exactly why.