Red Lights, Green Wine

Red Lights, Green Wine is a collection of novellas by Yi Shu. The Hong Kong edition was published by Cosmos Books in 1989, listed as No. 101 of Yi Shu's works; Taipei's Linbai Publishing House released a Traditional Chinese edition in 1990 (the 79th year of the Republic of China), included as No. 73 of the "Works of Yi Shu" series, about 287 pages in total. According to surviving tables of contents and edition records, the book comprises four novellas: "Little Neighbor," "Homework," "Red Lights, Green Wine," and "Evening"; some bibliographic records also mention a piece titled "Please Leave Him," indicating that the contents differ slightly between editions. The title is taken from the urban imagery of "red lights and green wine" in Hong Kong-style nightlife, pointing to the daily lives of urban men and women who cultivate relationships and weigh gains and losses amid neon lights and drink. Yi Shu habitually enters through calm, crisp, unadorned prose, writing about women torn between financial independence and emotional dependence: some are shrewd calculators, some stubborn to the end, and some sober up all the faster after being let down. Her writing seldom features shrill accusations; more often it shows self-preservation and a dignified exit after seeing through things, which is precisely the narrative foundation that has made her beloved by readers across the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan since the 1980s. This book is well suited to reading after such full-length novels as The Story of Rose and Flowing Gold, to appreciate the density and rhythm of Yi Shu's shorter narratives.