Description
"Can't you see?" she sobbed. "If I let you rape me, you will never love me."
She would have joined the long line of bondmaids, faceless, nameless to the men who called them up to their rooms and did not know or care if they ceased to appear because there were others to replace them. She would have joined that pool of bondmaids who were passed from bed to bed. Today's my turn. Tomorrow's yours.
A little girl is sold as a bondmaid into the House of Wu, where she grows up with the young heir. The idyll of childhood attachment quickly turns into a nightmare of thwarted sexual passion, as Han, beautiful, proud, uncompromisingly loyal, struggles against the forces of tradition and tyranny in that large mansion of many rooms and ancestral altars, where patriarchs and matriarchs wield inexorable power, lustful male relatives watch young bondmaids to claim their rightful share of pleasure, visiting monks devise ingenious schemes to combine holy public duty with unbridled private รฎndul- gence, and gods and goddesses, with careless insouci- ance, smile to see the human drama unfold.
Set in Singapore in the 1950s, the novel captures the special ethos of a wealthy and powerful Chinese household in that bygone era of beauty and earthiness, innocence and brutality. At once deeply disturbing and radiantly uplifting. The Bondmaid chronicles one woman's love in the fullness of its transforming and transcending power, right to its terrifying climax.
