Qian Zhongshu (Ch'ien Chung-shu, 1910-1998) was born into a literary family in Wuxi, Jiangsu province. Possibly the last in a line of Chinese thinkers that began with Confucius, he spent two years at Oxford, majoring in English and learning Latin and modern European languages. During the Cultural Revolution he was sent to a re-education camp with his wife, Yang Jiang. By 1974 he was presumed dead, but he later reappeared at a sinological conference in Italy. Qian wrote some of the most important texts on classical Chinese poetry and literature, essays, short stories, a second incomplete novel that was lost in the mail, and edited various groundbreaking anthologies.

Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, our hapless hero Fang Hung-chien (á la Emma Bovary), with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a fake American university in hand, returns home to Shanghai. On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, "With Miss Pao it wasn't a matter of heart or soul. She hadn't any change of heart, since she didn't have a heart." In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. Recalling Fielding's Tom Jones in its farcical litany of misadventures and Flaubert's "style indirect libre," Fortress Besieged is its own unique feast of delights.