Farewell to My Concubine

Farewell to My Concubine opens as nine-year-old Xiao Douzi is brought to a Beijing opera school and abandoned there by his mother, a prostitute. Enduring years of harsh training and cruelty, he befriends an older, stronger boy who becomes his guardian and closest companion — and the object of a love that will consume the rest of his life. Cast to play the female roles while his protector trains as the warrior, Xiao Douzi's identity and his devotion blur together on and off the stage.

When a beautiful courtesan enters their lives, an intricate and painful love triangle forms, and the novel follows its three figures across the turbulent decades of twentieth-century China — from the decadent glamour of 1930s Beijing through the horrors of the Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution to Hong Kong in the 1980s. Lilian Lee (Li Bihua) tells a tragic, richly atmospheric story of art, obsession, gender, and survival under history's upheavals.