Edna Wu

Passion of Clouds and Rain Edna Wu

It is a rare book about a Chinese woman's metamorphosis through cultural conflicts in love adventures. It contains five chapters. Chapter One, "Searching for the Music of the Soul", captures the amorous encounter of two professors on a California campus. It is deeply psychological and thrilling in the vortex of self-contradictions of the protagonist concerning a woman's quest for friendship, love, and self-identity. Chapter Two, "On the Wings," registers the narrator's first quixotic but promising adventures in America. Chapter Three, "An Ugly Duckling's Swan Song", reveals her culture shocks, agonies and setbacks on American campuses as a graduate student and her rebellious childhood in China with her father as a figure of communist authority and traditional patriarchy. Chapter Four, "Sex =/=Love?", shows how the protagonist Yun, a female Don Juan, embarks on the road to spiritual liberation through the separation of sex from love. In the final chapter, "A Separate Utopia", Yun has gone through purgation in the hell of East-West value conflicts. Does she find a utopia of her own?