All the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan Jepson

The protagonist is a naive young girl Xiao Feng, thrust into the world of the wealthy and powerful Sang family through a marriage arranged by her parents, a world she views as foreign and cruel.

The story is set in the 1930s Shanghai, spanning several decades into the 1960s. I was to discover that it didn’t really grab my attention as much as I expected. He is an Eurasian, brought up in the UK, but spent years studying, dating, traveling and working in Singapore, Hong Kong and China.īesides being a Singaporean and my Chinese background, I was also curious how convincingly he could tell a story on behalf of a woman with a first-person perspective. She felt that Chinese women needed to question the lives they were asked to lead and should be able to choose how and with whom they would spend their futures.ĭuncan Jepson wanted to explore Chinese attitudes towards motherhood, children and family.

She had made up her mind not to return to Singapore only a few years after arriving in the UK and probably missed home. He wrote this book largely because of his mother, a Singaporean Chinese who immigrated with her parents to the UK in the mid-1950s, became a doctor, engaging and enjoying English culture while retaining what she could of her Chinese heritage as she remembered it. All the Flowers in Shanghai is his first novel. But as the years pass, she must come to a reckoning with the sacrifices and the terrible choices she has made to assure her place in family and society, before the entire country is engulfed in the fast-flowing tide of revolution.The author, Duncan Jepson, is a lawyer who lives in Hong Kong. Ruthless and embittered by a life that has been forced on her, Feng plots a terrible revenge. In the enclosed world of the Sang household - a place of public ceremony and private cruelty - she learns that fulfilling her duty means bearing a male heir. For Feng, that means becoming the bride of a wealthy businessman in a marriage arranged by her parents.

In 1930s Shanghai, following the path of duty takes precedence over personal desires for every young Chinese woman. Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Industrial processes Reference, Information & Interdisciplinary subjects Hong Kong Golden Dragon Books 2022-2023.

All the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan Jepson