01.

The youngest daughter of the Yu family in Shaoxing, at 16, sneaked out of her home for the first time and found a gravely injured young man in the wheat stacks her family collected as rent. She hid him in the abandoned cellar of the Yu household, nursing him back to life while chattering about her cousin, to whom she was betrothed as a child. It wasn’t intentional nagging; in the secluded mansion, who else would listen to her?

At 18, her cousin returned from studying abroad and came to break off their engagement.

Miss Yu: My world has collapsed (omitting 500 words of inner turmoil).

02.

Progressive youth Song Qi met a girl who talked incessantly, conservative and backward in her thinking, completely unlike the modern women he knew. She annoyed him to no end, but since she saved his life, he tolerated her chatter.

One night in 1929, this little chatterbox knocked on the door of his Shanghai apartment.

“My cousin doesn’t want me anymore; he thinks I’m too feudal,” she said, shedding many tears.

“I told you he was blind,” Song Qi said, “but you are pretty feudal.”

After Song Qi’s death, the cousin came to find Miss Yu.

“But I won’t marry,” Miss Yu said.

“How can a woman not marry?” her cousin asked, puzzled.

“Someone taught me,” she replied. “He said I can live however I want.”

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