Xi Xi eloquently conveys the mood of the city during the 1980s in this collection of stories. In the first half of the decade, the Chinese and British governments negotiated Hong Kong's fate, occasioning among the general population intense soul-searching and close scrutiny of their society.

With three additional stories, the enlarged edition of this anthology presents samples from the author's entire writing career, ranging from the 1960s to the 1990s. It includes excerpts from Xi Xi's Elegy for a Breast, an intensely personal account of her own battle with cancer.

Hong Kong in the 1970s is a time of rapid economic growth, and more significantly, of growth in self-confidence and the forging of a local identity. In a disarming style that is uniquely her own, Xi Xi weaves a deceptively child-like narrative against the background of the political and social problems of this complex society.

Liu Yichang arrived in Hong Kong as a journalist from the wartime capital of Chungking, and has devoted the best part of his long career to serving the cause of literature in Hong Kong. He founded the influential Hong Kong Literature Monthly and is still active as its editor and as a translator of Western fiction into Chinese.

A valuable resource for the specialist, this volume also provides the general reader a glimpse into the lives of educated women in the 1920s and 30s in China through material seldom available in English. The women writers who tell their stories here broke boldly with tradition, taking the first steps in the formation of a new image of modern Chinese womanhood.

A ground-breaking collection featuring a sparkling array of stories from seven of Hong Kong and Taiwan's leading women writers. Writing from two Chinese experiences, the authors provide a glimpse of changing attitudes and social structures in dealing with topics such as abortion, runaway wives, family and female sexuality.

China's leading woman poet, Shu Ting worked in the countryside until 1973, returning to the city to work on construction sites and in factories. In spite of all this, her firm faith in the human spirit led her to poetry. Her pure style and mature voice found a ready response among a generation shaped by the experiences of the Cultural Revolution.

Gu Cheng was part of the group which founded the seminal non-official literary journal Today during the 1979-80 Democracy Wall movement, or 'Beijing Spring', of which his own work became emblematic. A major talent, his poety stands as a reminder of the quality of work produced in China in the mid-1980s, despite sporadic official attacks.

Liu Sola refuses to deal with serious subjects seriously. Or so it seems. Her wild casual style has a rebellious ring to it and her urbanite trend-setting protagonists are particularly appealing to China's younger generation. Behind the insistent frivolity and ephemeral tone, however, lie questions concerning the nature of art and the self-realization of the artist.

A prominent and innovative representative of the 'root-seeking' school of fiction writing, Han Shaogong draws on myths, folklore and religious traditions in his search for the causes of China's cultural stagenation. An atmosphere of doubt and mystery, a lack of ready answers, pervades Han's work—a major departure from the moralist, didactic and propaganda modes which marked Chinese literature in the recent past.

Mo Yan is a native of rural Shandong, the site of his fictional Gaomi County, whose history and traditions he evoked so memorably in his novel Red Sorghum. He has been hailed as a Chinese Faulkner and a magic realist in the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but his stories also draw deeply on Chinese tradition and culture as well as on his own experience of the harsh life of China's countryside and his time as a PLA soldier.