67 pages • 2 hours read
Chloe GongOur Violent Ends
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Romeo and Juliet and These Violent Delights
These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends comprise a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the well-known tragedy of star-crossed lovers from feuding families. The first known printing of the play appeared in 1597 and has since been translated into dozens of languages and formats, including films, radio productions, and ballets. Romeo and Juliet has also been adapted into various historical and cultural contexts, such as West Side Story’s (1961) tale of rival gangs in 1950s New York City, or Warm Bodies (2013), in which the ill-fated lovers are human and zombie. Though the narrative of Romeo and Juliet is traceable back to a single original play, the frequent reproductions and reinterpretations of the story have given it a status similar to cultural folklore.
In the original play, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet are the son and daughter of feuding families. Despite the animosity between their families—and their previous love interests—the young lovers vow to marry, no matter the cost. They concoct an elaborate plan to get away from their families so they can be together, but misunderstandings and impulsive choices get in the way. Romeo, believing Juliet has died, kills himself, and Juliet, finding her lover dead, stabs herself in the heart. Dismayed by the loss of their heirs, the Montagues and the Capulets decide to enter a tentative peace.
Chloe Gong adds to the robust history of Romeo and Juliet adaptations with These Violent Delights, which places protagonists Juliette Cai and Roma Montagov in a 1920s Shanghai that is controlled by rival gangs: the Scarlet Gang, of which Juliette is heir, and the White Flowers, of which Roma is heir. Even as the two gangs kill each other off as part of a longstanding blood feud, a greater threat looms: A monster that causes a contagious “madness” that leads its victims to tear out their own throats. Roma and Juliette, ex-lovers who have separated due to perceived betrayals, come together again to track down the monster and the person controlling it. Though they manage to kill the monster, they learn that other monsters remain to threaten Shanghai.
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Historical Context: The Shanghai Massacre and the Chinese Civil War
The Chinese Civil War was fought from 1927-1949 between the Kuomintang Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Though Our Violent Ends depicts a time in which the Kuomintang prevailed, the war concluded with communist control over mainland China. The CCP and the Kuomintang initially worked together to establish a unified rule over China, fighting against disparate warlords. In 1925, the party split; the Kuomintang worried that the Soviets were attempting to gain control via the communists within the party, and the communists disavowed the Northern Expedition, a military campaign designed to unite the country (as documented in the novel). On April 12, 1927, the right-wing branch of the Kuomintang enacted a violent purge of communists, an event known as the White Terror or Shanghai Massacre in which over 1 million people were killed.
In her historical note at the end of the novel, Gong mentions that though she has represented history as accurately as possible, she has altered the timeline of some Chinese Civil War events to improve narrative flow. Additionally, though several characters are part of or witness these real-world events, the only real person referenced in Our Violent Ends is Chiang Kai-shek, the commander of the Nationalists.
The Shanghai Massacre precluded the Autumn Harvest Uprising (September 1927), led by Mao Zedong, which established a short-lived Hunan Soviet. Mao would go on to be the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until his death in 1976. His ideologies comprise a Marxist offshoot known as Maoism.
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By Chloe Gong
