These Violent Delights Cosplay + Review
These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
A retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in 1920s Shanghai.
Preorder Links: preordertheseviolentdelights.com
Personal Rating: Juliette Cai could backhand me right into the Huangpu River, and I’d thank her
Reasons to Read: The richly realized world of 1920s Shanghai, the poetry-like prose, the tense mystery, the meticulously developed characters, the delicious and scathing discourse against colonialism, the doomed LOOOONGING between Roma and Juliette
So this is one of those books that makes me angry. Angry because I cannot BELIEVE I never knew the extent of how interesting the situation in 1920s Shanghai was. I mean, I knew it was a world class city on par with Paris and New York, but the complexity of its political and societal dynamics wasn’t something taught to me, despite me being Chinese. Growing up, the 1920s Shanghai c-dramas I’ve watched were mostly about undercover Communists struggling against the Kuomingtang (so, very thinly veiled propaganda). This book presents a much more complicated and nuanced view of the city then. It has the best of what I love so much about historical fiction. It instantly comes with gripping tension and fascinating dynamics because of that element of Realness to its background, and everything is much cooler knowing you’re learning about a real setting. Nothing gets more intense than real life.
“This place rumbles on Western idealism and Eastern labor, hateful of its split and unable to function without it, multiple facets fighting and grappling in an ever-constant quarrel. Half Scarlet, half White Flower; half filthy rich, half dirt poor; half land, half water flowing in from the East China Sea. There is nothing more but water to the east of Shanghai. Perhaps that is why the Russians have come here, these flocks of exiles who fled the Bolshevik Revolution and even before that, when their home could no longer be a home. If you decided to run, you might as well keep running until you came to the edge of the world. That is what this city is. The party at the end of the world.”
In the story, Shanghai is a city controlled by Western colonizers and two gangs, the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers. Juliette Cai and Roma Montagov are its respective heirs, but both face a multitude of pressures from inside and outside their gangs. Being heir to a gang is as precarious as being heir to a throne. They are doomed to command respect by continuing the blood feud between them, or they’d lose their positions and their ability to protect themselves and all that they love. The most interesting part of this retelling is that the expected forbidden romance actually happened four years before the start of the story, and it did not end well. So the tension between Juliette and Roma are that of jilted exes. It makes for a lot of hilarious, bickering dialogue and understandable angst as they’re forced to work together to save their city from a mysterious epidemic of madness (I can’t believe Chloe Gong invented 2020).
Juliette Cai is by far my favorite character, because she is the epitome of That Bitch. This ho speaks, like, 6 different languages and dialects (Mandarin, Shanghainese, English, French, Russian, Dutch). Before you call BS–no, this is indeed realistic for someone born into an elite family at the time. One endlessly entertaining part of the book was her and Roma switching between different languages depending on their surroundings, and the general exploration of language. She’s a breath of fresh air in that she’s an elite who fully embraces her elitism. There is nothing humble or awkward about her. She is better than you and KNOWS it, and you better know it as well.
“Juliette was the queen of socialites. She had had nothing but practice. If she wanted to, she could have turned her slight, polite smile into a megawatt grin within a second of her life. But she did not think she could get any information out of Paul, and associating with him seemed pointless.”
Part of her ruthlessness was honed by a massive, bloody betrayal by Roma that ended their young romance four years ago. It’s pretty clear early on that Roma’s hand was forced, though. He spends most of the book being Very Tired of all the BS around him, yet there’s an undeniable fire in him that drives him to fight to keep his position as heir, because he’d probably die the moment he lost it for good. There are no cinnamon rolls here. Once you find out the truth of what he did, it’s understandable, but you’re not sure he should be forgiven either, which makes for great tension in how this would all resolve.
“He ached with the knowledge that the softness of their youth was gone forever, that the Juliette he remembered was long dead. He ached even more to think that though he was the one who had dealt the killing blow, he had still dreamed of her in these four years, of the Juliette whose laughter had rung along the riverside. It was a haunting. He had buried Juliette like a corpse beneath the floorboards, content to live with the ghosts that whispered to him in his sleep. Seeing her again was like finding the corpse beneath the floorboards to not only have resurrected, but to be pointing a gun right at his head.”
Aside from Juliette and Roma, the side characters are pretty fantastic as well. There’s a trio on each side, Juliette/Kathleen/Rosalind vs Roma/Benedikt/Marshall. Benedikt and Marshall have got a Will They/Won’t They thing going on, and Kathleen provides !!trans rep!!, rare in historical fiction. Each is thoroughly fleshed out and play off each other well as the threat of the contagious madness forces them to interact.
“Rosalind’s lips thinned. Her volume dropped, until it was not loud but cold, not angry but accusatory. “Here I was, thinking you were the pacifist of the family.”
Pacifist. Kathleen almost laughed aloud. Of all the words to describe her, pacifist could not be farther from the truth. All because she did not care for bloodshed, and suddenly she was an almighty saint. She would pull a switch to instantly end all life in this city if it meant she herself could have some peace and quiet.”
What it means to “belong” versus how complicated actual identities can get is a big theme in the book. Even though Juliette is the heiress to half of Shanghai, she spent most of her life getting an American education. She’s actively identified by her American way of dressing. At one point, Roma remarks that he’s actually spent more time in Shanghai and China than her. And the discourse goes beyond East vs West–there’s also the Chinese cultural drama of how family names can arbitrarily mark you as forever an outsider, no matter how close you are to the seat of power.
Much as Kathleen hated it, her sister was right. It mattered little that they were more closely related to the beating core of the Cais than the other second, third, fourth cousins. So long as their last name was different, there would always be that doubt in the family over whether Rosalind and Kathleen truly belonged here. They came from Lady Cai’s side—the side that had been brought into this house rather than the side that had been raised in it for generations.
I see the “madness” in the book, which compels people to tear out their own throats, as a metaphor for the damage the Shanghainese are doing to themselves as they cling to collective feuds and fight among their own. Their casualties only make room for colonizers and Communists to move into the city, yet Juliette and Roma’s parental generations refuse to put down their pride and consider the bigger picture. When Juliette and Roma were younger, they dreamt innocently of being better than the blood feud they inherited, just like in the original play, but can they do it when there’s personal bad blood between them? Preorder to find out 😎
Bonus Cosplay Shots:
