Taipei People

About

Fourteen stories about Chinese mainlanders who fled to Taiwan after the Communist revolution, carrying with them the rituals, memories, and social hierarchies of a world that no longer exists. A retired general tends his garden with military precision. A former Shanghai nightclub hostess reinvents herself in Taipei's social scene. A widow replays her husband's funeral as if staging it might bring back the life before. Pai Hsien-yung writes exile not as a single dramatic rupture but as an ongoing negotiation between who these people were and who they've become. Each story is precisely observed, emotionally generous, and attuned to the way dignity persists in diminished circumstances. A landmark of modern Chinese literature — stories about people living in the gap between two countries, belonging fully to neither.