And interestingly, she achieves this balance by illustrating that transcendent sorts of oppression characterize both of these socioeconomic systems. Through the transformations of Mei-Ling throughout the story, Lachs shows that the unequal position of women in various societies, regardless of which political system holds sway, functions as a persistent common denominator, despite dreams of revolution. Mei-Ling's violent induction into sexual experience while a member of the Red Guard attests to an inequality that persists despite the pretension of comradeship. Her survival through her occupations of mistress and prostitute constitutes a perhaps more patent symptom of women's inequality in a capitalist system. Without money to earn one's keep, one becomes kept.
Money is useful.
Lachs refrains from offering easy answers to the problems of inequality that characterize the diverse socioeconomic systems traversing her novel. Her resistance to definitive judgments concerning the rightness of one system versus another is borne out by the fact that she concludes the action of the novel at the time of Great Britain's return of the colony of Hong Kong to the Chinese. Tucson Weekly . Info Booth .