Farewell My Concubine Study Guide

Despite her popularity in the Chinese-speaking world, relatively little is known about the life of Lilian Lee elsewhere. She was born in 1958 or 1959 in the city of Taishan and was raised in a wealthy and prominent family in Hong Kong. Her father inherited his father’s traditional Chinese medicine practice. Lee has been fond of literature since childhood and even contributed to her middle school’s weekly student publication. She has worked in a few different fields, including education, professional dance, and film and television. Lee is a prolific writer who has published more than 100 novels and written several dozen screenplays for movies and television shows. While only two of Lee’s works have been translated to English (Farewell My Concubine [1992] and The Last Princess of Manchuria [1995] about Yoshiko Kawashima), many others have been adapted to film. The most celebrated of these include Rouge (1985), Fight and Love with a Terracotta Warrior (1989), Kawashima Yoshiko (1990), Farewell My Concubine (1993), and Green Snake (1993). The film adaptation of Farewell My Concubine won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Lee’s writing has been published in newspapers and magazines in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, where she currently resides.

Farewell My Concubine begins in Peking in 1929 and ends in Hong Kong in the mid-1980s, providing an overview of 60 years of Chinese history through the lens of the Peking opera. By 1929, the Qing dynasty had long been overthrown and replaced with the Republic of China, a fact that is referenced in the book through the character of Master Ni. Then, beginning in the 1930s, Japan occupied China, leading to a first Sino-Japanese War, which was followed by Japan’s full-scale invasion of China and a second war from 1937-1945. The arrests of both protagonists, Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou, occur in relation to activity that took place during this period. In 1946, a civil war broke out between China’s Nationalists and Communists, and the Communists prevail and set up the People’s Republic of China under the leadership of Mao Zedong (referred to as Chairman Mao in the novel). A series of changes seeking to drastically reorganize political and economic structures took place over the course of more than a decade, followed by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, one of the bloodiest periods of modern Chinese history. During this time, the Communists sought to rid China of anything that could be considered “bourgeois,” and this results in, among other things, the destruction of historical artifacts and abolishment of China’s traditional culture, including the Peking opera, which was seen as feudalistic. Counterrevolutionaries were also executed en masse, and reactionaries were violently evicted from their homes and sent to the countryside to be re-educated in labor camps. At the end of the novel, Duan Xiaolou escapes from his re-education assignment and flees to Hong Kong, while Cheng Dieyi is ultimately “rehabilitated,” meaning his social status is restored once Mao and his collaborators are ousted.

Farewell My Concubine and The Last Princess of Manchuria are the only two of Lilian Lee’s novels that have been translated into English. These works delve into China’s tumultuous 20th-century history. Other works do something similar include Su Tong’s Rice (1995) and Eileen Chang’s Half a Lifelong Romance (1948; both are set in China the 1930s, the decade in which Farewell My Concubine begins, and reveal different perspectives on the period. Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which was originally published in French, delves more specifically into the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, depicting two young male protagonists who have been exiled to rural China for “re-education.” Finally, Jung Chang’s English-language memoir Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991) incorporates her mother and grandmother’s biographies and her own autobiography to provide a window into nearly a century of Chinese history.