East Wind

Kwei-lan has been raised to become the obedient wife in a marriage arranged before her birth. Her husband, however, returns from medical study abroad with Western habits and expectations that unsettle everything she has learned about beauty, marriage and a woman's duty. Living away from the larger family gradually allows affection to replace ceremony, but it also makes Kwei-lan an uneasy interpreter between two systems of life.

The conflict intensifies when her brother returns from the United States with an American wife and expects his parents to accept a marriage made for love. Kwei-lan's account moves between sympathy for her mother, loyalty to ancestral custom and recognition that the younger generation cannot simply resume the old household order. The novel presents cultural change through intimate negotiations over marriage, medicine, gender and family authority in early Republican China.