Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life

摘要

Last fall, an old friend I was visiting, whose work on China I admire, showed me excitedly a copy of a new book that she said she loved and thought I would, too. It was Jie Li's Shanghai Homes. Since I only had a chance to flip through the pages quickly, I was delighted to get an email several months later asking me to review it. And yet, in spite of that conversation - or, to be honest, because of it - I felt uneasy as soon as I had agreed to do the review. My worry was that, coming to it with such high expectations, I would be disappointed and this would colour unfairly my review of a scholar's first book. My misgivings increased when I saw the phrase "silently stunning" on its back cover. I need not have worried: the book is as good as my friend said. It actually is - and I doubt I've ever used this word in a review before - stunning.