Taipei People and The Eternal Snow Beauty

Posted: June 19th, 2026 | No Comments »

I’ll probably be talking about this new short story collection published this May, Taipei People, from Pai Hsien-Yung (Vintage Classic) more on the blog, but wanted to mention specifically that it includes the short story The Eternal Snow Beauty, a classic of Modernist writing about Shanghai.

Taiwanese-American author Pai Hsien-Yung has been often overlooked in translation, and this collection rectifies that omission. Guilin-born (1937) Pai was the son of a (Muslim) KMT General. He grew up in Shanghai, Nanjing and Chongqing (with a brief period at a Catholic school in Hong Kong) before his family left for Taiwan. He later moved to America (and became a Buddhist – religion #3). Taipei People, a collection of short stories dealing with the relocation of various Chinese people from mainland China to Taiwan after the Nationalist defeat in 1949 (Pai’s family actually departed in 1952), was published in Chinese in 1971. His stories employ literary techniques of Modernism, nostalgia, melancholy and remembrance with historical fiction. The great literary critic CT Hsia believed Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) and Pai Hsian-Yung were the best Chinese short fiction writers of the twentieth century. And, if you are a fan of Chang, particularly her more direct Shanghai/Hong Kong short stories such as Lust, Caution, Love in a Fallen City, The Golden Cangue then you’ll appreciate Pai.

But I want to just specifically mention his story The Eternal Snow Beauty. The aging “Snow Beauty” (Yin Hsueh-yen) looks back on her days as the belle of Shanghai’s Paramount Ballroom. She, like so many of her former clients, has left for Taipei but is still the centre of attention at upscale mahjong soirees she arranges at her new home. It is a quite incredible story as it both recreates the per-revolutionary days of the Paramount and the new lives of the slightly down-at-heel self-exiled former bourgeois Shanghainese in Taipei. Like Lust, Caution, old Shanghai aficionados will spot the Paramount, Park Hotel, the Jessfield, the Lyceum Theatre and other locations. For those interesting in 1950s Taipei it is also an evocation of that world the Shanghainese tried to recreate – a world of qipao, mahjong, ua-hua, xiaolongbao and smart social gatherings. The scene is the old Cheng Chong (Chengzhong) District, now incorporated into the larger Zhongzheng District, that was once the most fashionable area of town and heavily influenced by the Shanghainese who went to Taiwan and took their sophisticated bourgeois Shanghai ways with them.

The Eternal Snow Beauty, which was originally written in the 1960s (so only 15 years or so after its setting period) has been available in English before – in a translation by Catherine Carlitz and Anthony C Yü published in the excellent, but perhaps niche, Renditions (that translated so much good Chinese Modernist writing). And, indeed, this is the translation used in the new Vintage Classic edition too.

Anyway, while for those who study the city or just find old Shanghai fascinating the new edition of Taipei People in English and The Eternal Snow Beauty is a treat, accompanied by about another dozen stories that cove the same period and those who fled China for Taiwan.

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