Please join us on 27 March for a discussion of Fu Ping by Wang Anyi.

Few writers have become as synonymous with Shanghai as Eileen Chang and Wang Anyi. In Wang`s latest work to appear in English, Fu Ping (translated into beautiful English by the eminent sinologist Howard Goldblatt), an orphaned teenage girl from rural Yangzhou, is arranged to marry Li Tianhua. Before the marriage, she is sent to Shanghai to live for some time with Tianhua`s adoptive grandmother, Nainai, who has been a nanny in Shanghai for 30 years, to learn all that is useful and necessary for a future housewife. Fu Ping's path in life seems to have been set out for her.

However, Fu Ping has her own ideas. She places great importance on her marriage prospects and gradually transforms her rural sensibilities into urban ones. More and more, Fu Ping takes the predetermined life of marriage and menial work into her own hands.

The plot, though, is more a pretext for Wang Anyi to tell her stories about Shanghai`s urban landscape, to wander along its lanes and alleyways, watch the inhabitants preoccupied with their everyday life, smell the odors and aromas, catch the special way of life in this peculiar Shanghainese neighborhood, and tell the complex histories of the local families.

After the much acclaimed novel Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Fu Ping is another wonderful novel about Shanghai by one of the most emblematic figures of modern Chinese literature.

The book is available in Kindle and audiobook form on Amazon​.