Sold by her uncle in 1907 to the First Salon of Gifted Girls, a reputable brothel, sixteen-year-old Cassia is plucked from the ranks of servant girl by a powerful client. Power Chang is the boss of the fearsome Shanghai Triad. In spite of her large feet and pendulous breasts, both unbound, Cassia swiftly becomes his favorite mistress and enjoys her first passionate encounters as well as her first taste of luxurious living. The story follows Cassia after the violent death of Power Chang and her subsequent rise to “godmother” of Shanghai. She not only seduces the next Triad boss, Huang, after he hears her opera troupe, but also his lacky, Yu, who replaces the murdered Huang as the next Triad leader. This novel will appeal to anyone interested in China, triad politics and history, and the position of women as sexual slaves to men in Shanghai’s houses of ill repute. Hong Ying grew up in the 1960s in the slums of Chongquing on the Yangtze River in China. An author and poetess, she is best known in the English-speaking world for her novels K: The Art of Love, Peacock Cries, Summer of Betrayal, and her autobiography, Daughter of the River.
Author
Hong Ying was born in Chongqing in 1962, towards the end of the Great Leap Forward. She began to write at eighteen, leaving home shortly afterwards to spend the next ten years moving around China, exploring her voice as a writer via poems and short stories. After brief periods of study at the Lu Xun Academy in Beijing and Shanghai’s Fudan University, Hong Ying moved to London in 1991 where she as writer. She returned to Beijing in 2000. Best known in English for the novels K: the Art of Love, Summer of Betrayal, Peacock Cries, and her autobiography Daughter of the River, Hong Ying has been published in twenty- nineteen languages and has appeared on the bestseller lists of numerous countries, she won the Prize of Rome for K: the Art of Love in 2005 and many of her books have been or are now in the process of being turned into television series and films. Hong Ying has long been interested in the stories of homosexuals living in China, a theme explored here and in her short story collection, A Lipstick Called Red Pepper: Fiction About Gay and Lesbian Love in China 1993-1998. In her work, she likes to focus on human stories, hardship and history. Her responsibility as a writer, she believes, is in part to explore the lives of marginalised groups struggling for visibility – and for compassion – in contemporary China. Chinese Profile: 虹影
