Yu Chang was the happy product of her mother’s first marriage. It was to a foreign man, and ended in divorce when Yu Chang was an infant. While scandalous to some, in the cosmopolitan environs of Changan, there was more than enough “room” for such a woman to live in peace and raise her daughter, and even remarry, moving in the ranks of educators and artists as she did. Mingmei’s second husband was a writer of humble, unassuming bearing, admired by many, and quietly successful. Yu Chang was adopted wholly and without reservation by Li Shen when she was a toddler. She knows little of her life before Shen took her under his wing, but this is about to change.