When True Love Came to China

Lynn Pan was born in Shanghai and educated at London and Cambridge, England. She is the author of more than a dozen books on China and the Chinese diaspora, including Shanghai Style, Tracing It Home, and Sons of the Yellow Emperor, the winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize.

This book, Lynn Pan's best to date, adds a wonderful new angle by encouraging us, via comparison, to better appreciate how unusual, even in some ways exotic, a part of the Western past we take for granted, as though it were natural, actually is. While the reader will learn a great deal about Chinese literary and cultural traditions from this book, if read with an open mind the Western reader may end up rethinking things about his or her tradition just as deeply. -- Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Chancellor's professor of history, University of California at Irvine Nobody writes about China quite as brilliantly as Lynn Pan, who in this new, illuminating work on love showcases her trademark erudition entwined with a novelist's sensibility. Pan's rare skill makes the book a treat from start to finish; a sumptuous, deft and moving analysis of China's relationship with love. -- Mishi Saran, author of Chasing the Monk's Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang and The Other Side of Light Lynn Pan is one of the great social historians of early 20th-century China, as attuned to the subterranean life of private emotions as to the meaning of large tumultuous events. Her new book, When True Love Came to China, is a rich and gripping account of how the first generation of modern Chinese intellectuals and writers discovered the pleasures - and sufferings - of romantic love. -- Pankaj Mishra Guardian