Bai Liusu wants a legitimate marriage status and economic stability from Fan Liuyan, a Chinese bachelor who had just returned from Britain.

Bai Liusu is subjected daily to her family members' taunts and insults as she has “no money to maintain a respectful position in the household nor the youth to qualify as a desirable bride on the marriage market”.

Due to the persistence of traditional forces, ethical-moral values, various domestic and international conflicts and wars, a bourgeois self-identity becomes difficult to establish.

Under this robust womanhood, “in its core, it harbors a profound cultural and historical nihilism.”[7] At the ending paragraphs of the Love in a Fallen City, Shanghai has come under full-scale Japanese occupation, Hong Kong has lost its brief battle, and China faces its darkest years as a nation under siege.

[5] Nicole Huang made a comment on Eileen Chang's essays which could be equally applied onto her fictions under wartime background: "Here, Chang’s vision of wartime life is presented as caught between the territory of historical reality (war, turbulence, blockade, hunger, death, and scarcity) and the domain of imagination (fantasy, emotional yearning, and artistic creativity).

The persistence of the singing voice in a night she describes as so “big," so “broken,” and so “cruel" is, of course, Eileen Chang's own reading of an individual's relation to the larger and, at times, overwhelming historical reality.

the city was also captured by the Japanese forces after the defeat of the British, Canadian and Indian forces on the Christmas Day as the Governor of Hong Kong Mark Aitchison Young, accompanied by other British colonial officials surrendered at the Japanese headquarters,[10] the local people had referred to the day as “Black Christmas”[11] Hong Kong too, had become the second ‘fallen’ city in the novella.

In her essay, “Reflections on ‘Love in a Fallen City’” (回顧傾城之戀, 1984), Chang relates that during the summer break in her studies at the University of Hong Kong in 1941 she often went to the Repulse Bay Hotel to visit her mother and her mahjong friends.

Chang claims that Love in a Fallen City is based on the story of this couple who remained in Hong Kong.

In her words, “The motive for writing ‘Love in a Fallen City’— at least in relation to their story—I think it was because they were the most affected by the war in Hong Kong among my acquaintances.” According to Chang, then, the “original” idea for the tale came from the real-life experience of a couple she knew.

The couple's love story might in fact replicate conventional cultural codes of behavior and fictional or non-fictional historical episodes.

Typical of the writer's stories about social mannerisms, this novelette is “filled with witty conversations and relentless gossip,” “intricate codes of dress, dining, and socializing,” and “arabesque mannerisms in both private and public domains,” which are “taken as matters of life and death for those leisurely regulars.”[7] Wang Xiaoping, an associate professor of Chinese and comparative literature in the school of Chinese at Xiamen University, China, indicated that "the predominant thematic focus of Zhang’s stories is a matrimonial anxiety by which middle-class women aim to cash in on any opportunity to unabashedly transcend their class status to secure financial security and a boost in their social status.

In its response to the crisis of marriage and love as social institution, this anxiety articulates, crystallizes, and projects the social-political dilemma and predicament of this class.

Together with the pessimism generated by the social turmoil and human costs of the “war,” a sense of resignation appears, which, while it sometimes impersonates itself as robust womanhood, in its core it harbors a profound cultural and historical nihilism".

[7] Fu Lei (Chinese:傅雷) praised her talent and art but criticized the content of her fiction “taken up by flirtation” and “it’s all a spiritual game of cynical hedonists.” He continues to criticize that despite love and marriage is the author's central theme, the couple in the story is often “pestered by this nightmare of a romantic problem between man and woman” and the flippancy depicted in her somber prose ruins the art of her writing.

Chang later wrote a self-defensive essay called “My Own Writing” to articulate her aesthetic principles, cenci de duizhao, which Karen Kingsbury considers it more than just elaborating theme and character, but also operating at the level of narrative style, “in the teasing voice of the narrator, and the frequent shuttling between, for instance, self-mockery and self-indulgence, fantasy and reality, satire and sympathy.”[12] Liu Zaifu, the famous Chinese littérateur, ideologist and humanist mentioned in his article that “At first glance, Eileen Chang’s best works, including “The Golden Cangue” and “Love in a Fallen City,” describe the details of family activities, love relationships, and marriages that occupy mundane life in places like Shanghai, but they in fact reveal the eternal mysteries in human nature that lie beneath the surface of life, mysteries of human desires for power and money.”[13] Liang Wendao: "A lot of people tend to ignore the connection between Eileen Chang's work and the Sino Japanese War.

Just like in Love in a fallen city, where she didn't mention how the people in Hong Kong escaped from the gunfire, or what happened between the British and the Japanese forces on the battlefield.