The Rouge of the North

By Eileen Chang

1998

First Published

3.73

Average Rating

310

Number of Pages

9H28M

Audio Length

The Rouge of the North is the story of Yindi, a beautiful young bride who marries the blind, bedridden son of a rich and noble family. Captive to household ritual, to the strategies and contempt of her sisters-in-law, and to the exacting dictates of her husband's mother, Yindi is pressed beneath the weight of an existence that offers no hope of change. Dramatic events in the outside world fail to make their way into this insular society. Chang's brilliant portrayal of the slow suffocation of passion, moral strength, and physical vitality―together with her masterful evocation of the sights, smells, and sounds of daily existence―make The Rouge of the North a remarkable chronicle of a vanished way of life.

Avg Rating

3.73

Number of Ratings

190

5 STARS

21%

4 STARS

41%

3 STARS

28%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Eileen Chang

Author · 29 books

Eileen Chang is the English name for Chinese author 張愛玲, who was born to a prominent family in Shanghai (one of her great-grandfathers was Li Hongzhang) in 1920. She went to a prestigious girls' school in Shanghai, where she changed her name from Chang Ying to Chang Ai-ling to match her English name, Eileen. Afterwards, she attended the University of Hong Kong, but had to go back to Shanghai when Hong Kong fell to Japan during WWII. While in Shanghai, she was briefly married to Hu Lancheng, the notorious Japanese collaborator, but later got a divorce. After WWII ended, she returned to Hong Kong and later immigrated to the United States in 1955. She married a scriptwriter in 1956 and worked as a screenwriter herself for a Hong Kong film studio for a number of years, before her husband's death in 1967. She moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1972 and became a hermit of sorts during her last years. She passed away alone in her apartment in 1995.