City of the Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong
312City of the Queen: A Novel of Colonial Hong Kong
312Hardcover(New Edition)
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Overview
After being kidnapped from her home in rural China, Huang, the novel's heroine, is brought to Hong Kong and sold into prostitution. Thanks to her shrewd, sometimes devious business dealings and unexpected twists of fate, she emerges from these cruel beginnings to become a wealthy landowner. City of the Queen follows the fortunes of Huang's family, including those of her devoutly Christian daughter-in-law, who tries to redeem the sins she believes Huang has committed; her grandson, who becomes the first Chinese judge on the Hong Kong Supreme Court; and her great-granddaughter, a quintessential Hong Kong young woman, who turns her back on family tradition to revel in the pleasures offered by the 1970s and 1980s metropolis.
The novel introduces a range of other Chinese and British characters, examining the complicated relationships between colonizer and colonized in a searing and perceptive portrayal of colonialism. There is Adam Smith, the British officer who struggles with the competing seductions of Huang's beauty and British respectability; Qu Yabing, Smith's servant, who despises anything Chinese, yet becomes Huang's lover after she is abandoned by Smith; Colonel White, the sadistic colonial police chief; and Auntie Eleven, a concubine who owns a pawnshop and teaches Huang the secrets of the trade.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780231134569 |
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Publisher: | Columbia University Press |
Publication date: | 06/22/2005 |
Series: | Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan |
Edition description: | New Edition |
Pages: | 312 |
Product dimensions: | 0.81(w) x 9.00(h) x 6.00(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
A sensual retelling of Madama Butterfly and The World of Suzie Wong, this fascinating colonial drama of sex and economy stretches from the British occupation of Hong Kong to the eve of its return to China. City of the Queen is beautifully translated and is a must read for postcolonial scholars.
A sensual retelling of Madama Butterfly and The World of Suzie Wong, this fascinating colonial drama of sex and economy stretches from the British occupation of Hong Kong to the eve of its return to China. City of the Queen is beautifully translated and is a must read for postcolonial scholars.
Ping-hui Liao, professor of literary and critical studies, National Tsinghua University, Taiwan
After coming to national renown in the 1960s with her experimental, avant-garde short stories, Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-Ching amply demonstrated her equally impressive talents for epic works of fiction in City of the Queen (an abridged translation of the Hong Kong Trilogy). The story is about a legendary woman whose life, and the miracles filling it, are intertwined with the tortuous history of Hong Kong's colonial era. The imminent event of the 1997 Handover, looming large in the book in the form of an anxiety that cannot be dispelled, inevitably imbues it with a strong sense of history. Witnessing an epoch coming to an end, the author contemplates issues of race, gender, and human fate that profoundly complicate the life of the novel's protagonist as well as that of every other Hong Kong resident.
Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, University of Texas, author of Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law