Au-Yang Fai: A Time to Rend

Young, beautiful Hong Kong actress Au-yang Fai is the queen of Chinese cinema. But beneath the vacuous sheen of her elegant parties and affluent lifestyle, she hides a political consciousness which, in the turbulent times of Hong Kong in the sixties, could prove fatal. For, unbeknownst to all but her closest friends, Au-yang Fai is plotting rebellion with the communists against the colony's imperialist British rulers. Charged with organising and arming the uprising, Au-yang Fai finds herself wrestling with internal doubts, her own becalming ennui, and the spectre of her allies' treachery. A spare and haunting novella, Au-yang Fai is a subtle psychological vignette of a person - and a country - stranded at the crossroads between old identity and new.