Peony in Love
Lisa See
 Peony's father, a wealthy, cultured man with important political contacts, is planning a performance of The Peony Pavilion on his estate. This is seen by many as controversial because the opera may influence young women into imitating Liniang, starving themselves to death in hopes of finding love. Unfortunately, this is just what happens to Peony. She is deeply moved by the text and performance of The Peony Pavilion, having extensively written about her feelings and reactions to love in her copy of the text. On the evening of the opera performance, Peony accidentally meets a handsome young man. After three nighttime meetings, Peony falls in love, but she also falls into deep despair, feeling doomed because of being trapped in an arranged marriage. Following the example of Du Liniang, she starves herself to death, only to learn right before her death that the man her father has picked for her is Wu Ren, the man she loves. Most of Peony in Love takes place after Peony's death. Because her funeral rituals are not concluded properly, she becomes a "hungry ghost", who wanders far beyond the inner world of women that constrained her in her youth. In the process, she encounters a number of women writers who lament the difficulty of getting their voices heard in a male-dominated world. From her dead grandmother, she learns many painful details about her family's past as the Qing Dynasty violently replaced the Ming Dynasty, details later amplified by Peony's mother. Peony comes to learn about the courage and extreme suffering both older women experienced during the fighting and that the sternness her mother treated her with as a girl was only her attempt to protect her daughter from the evils of the outside world. Peony shows her enduring love for Ren by her influence on his second and third wives, who add their personal responses to The Peony Pavilion, thus becoming sister wives, although Peony remains first wife. Given the appropriate funeral rites at last, Peony is no longer a hungry ghost but a spirit who looks forward with great joy to meeting her husband again in the afterworld.