Shanghai'S Tales Of Beauty And Tragedy eBook

She was the daughter of Shang Guan Yun Zhu, a film star from old Shanghai, and her father, Yao Ke, was a cultural figure who had studied abroad. At the age of two, her parents divorced, and she learned to hide her worries deep inside while wearing a smile on her face. Her childhood was one of privilege-she even made a cameo as a wealthy girl in the film The Adventures of Sanmao. Later, when her financial resources nearly dried up, she refused to reveal her hardship to her lover, viewing love as a pure ivory tower. She was an ordinary person in extraordinary times, bearing the bitter blows of fate: her mother's suicide, her lover's suicide, her child being forced into adoption, attempting to flee the country illegally only to be captured... Just as life seemed to offer a glimmer of hope, a traffic accident on West Nanjing Road forever froze her existence in the autumn of her 31st year.Her name was Yao Yao. Born in 1944 amidst chaos, she died tragically in 1975.When this book was first published in 2000, neither Yao Yao's long-lost lover Kaikai nor her child had been found. By the 2009 reprint, Kaikai had been located, prompting the author to supplement the previously unverified parts of the story. In 2013, Yao Yao's child came forward to reunite with relatives, by then already middle-aged.When Kaikai returned that year, thunderstorms raged overhead. That year, when Yao Yao's child visited his mother and grandmother's graves, heavy snow fell...Chen Danyan climbed along the painful memories of survivors, transforming the tragic past of this Shanghai woman into an independent testament to Shanghai's history. She also made the personal history of an ordinary person a flesh-and-blood coordinate within the torrent of a great era.