Ordinary Days

Testimony to the emotional truth of their life together even in these increasingly trying times.

The memoir Ordinary Days by the scholar and critic Leo Ou-fan Lee and his wife Esther Yuk-ying Lee brings to this Hong Kong series an intensely personal touch, consciously echoing the great sentimental memoir of 18th-century China, Shen Fu’s Six Chapters of a Floating Life. With disarming candour, Leo and Esther lay bare their hearts so unreservedly, to share with us their story of love and suffering, charting in a series of memorable chapters their shared spiritual quest. This is a brave book. It lays bare in a most unusual way the heart and soul of a charming and highly cultivated Chinese couple, the scholar and critic Leo Ou-fan Lee and his wife Esther Lee Yuk-ying. It charts the love story of two individuals who are no longer young, and it also boldly breaks the taboo surrounding the twin topics of depression and suicide.

Set partly against the recent backdrop of some of Hong Kong’s most turbulent years, partly in the far-flung diaspora of the Chinese intelligentsia, this is a revealing record of the inner life of a highly cultivated modern Chinese couple. In presenting this work to English-speaking readers, we hope to demonstrate that, Hong Kong "is one of the high places of the multicultured world".

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“In these letters of theirs, Leo and Esther bare their hearts truthfully, transcending self and emotion and all sense of age, until all that is left is purity and truth. The later chapters record their deep love as husband and wife, his devotion to her, and their inseparable bond, in the course of which they put aside all social convention.”

––Pai Hsien-yung, Author of the Taipei People