Passion of Clouds and Rain

Passion of Clouds & Rain is an erotic and provocative literary novel about a Chinese woman’s sensual journey into American life. The novel is approximately 250 pages with five chapters. The heroine, Yun, is a young woman who immigrates to the US for graduate school in English Literature in the 1980’s and begins her quest for romantic, sexual, spiritual, and intellectual fulfillment. Chapters 1-3 cover Yun’s numerous cultural shocks in dealing with obesity, plagiarism, homophobia, and her exploration of life’s enigma on sex and love. Chapter 4 is the most romantic chapter culminating in unrequited love. Chapter 5 is the most political chapter where Yun comes to peace with her East and West contradictions and liberates herself from both sex and love.
“Clouds and Rain” means sex in classical Chinese usage and this novel artfully employs symbolism from Chinese and Western literature and mythology. It will appeal to a wide variety of popular readers including romance, erotica, feminist, political science, Asian American, and English literature readers. It also has the potential to become a classic as no other Asian American novel explores the issue of female power and sexuality to the same depth.
I am a Professor of Chinese at California State University, Los Angeles. I will be happy to help promote this book through my students and colleagues in the classroom upon its publication. Through my academic contacts, I obtained reviews from several academic reviewers. Jonathan Spence from Yale University said, "One can read this breathless work as a modern-day update of Ding Ling’s celebrated Diary of Miss Sophie." And Fatima Wu from Loyola Marymount University calls it "A short modern version of Tale of Genji," and believes that “This feminist book traverses two countries and two very different cultures, tied together by the single narrator “Yun”. … Her ordeal is comparable to that depicted in The Woman Warrior, only on a more mature political and sensual level.”

Book reviews:
By focusing on the narrator’s self-absorbed quest for erotic and intellectual fulfillment, Edna Wu’s “Memoir” offers a new slant to the currently urgent question of how the latest generation of Chinese immigrants can find home in America. One can read this breathless work as a modern-day update of Ding Ling’s celebrated “Diary of Miss Sophie.
—Jonathan Spence, Yale University

In both form and content, what an unusual combination of prose and poetry, eros and logos, America and China, Edna Wu has given us!
—Michelle Yeh, University of California, Davis