The Bitter Tea of General Yen

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Megan Davis arrives in Shanghai expecting to find Bob and instead steps into a city of rain, barbed-wire boundaries, and uneasy beauty, where colonial order, Chinese authority, and private loyalties collide in the street before her eyes. The accident she witnesses—a speeding car, an injured chauffeur, a coolly self-possessed Chinese gentleman, soldiers, priests, and bystanders—becomes her first lesson in the harsh complexity of Shanghai, where sympathy and indifference, civility and power, are never far apart. Inside the English-style house of the Jacksons, missionary certainty and domestic bickering offer a sheltered island from the turmoil outside, even as news of executions, political unrest, and dangerous loyalties makes clear how unstable that refuge is. Megan's journey to China is rooted in a deeper transformation: once a privileged, beautiful girl in a New England college town, she had grown cynical after losing the special place beauty gave her, until Bob's return with news of his medical mission and a proposal awakened in her a new faith in service, sacrifice, and love. But in China, her ideals are tested by the blunt assumptions of foreigners, the reserve of Mah-li, and the formidable presence of General Yen, whose first private exchanges with her are a tense duel of wit, suspicion, and attraction.