The contrast between the style of Little Reunions and that of Chang’s early prose yields a surprising insight about the latter: it was not only its immediate aesthetic appeal but also an effect of reassurance that made the early work such a pleasure. This has something to do with the ‘draping’ and ‘dressing’ effect of Chang’s refined language: like a veil, it softens the abject; like a gauze, it salves the wounds of the world’s atrocities. Little Reunions, by contrast, suggests that at this point of her life, Chang no longer believed in the comforting and affirming power of the aesthetic, or in the idea that no matter how terrible things are, they can somehow be ‘captured’—as beasts are—through art, or that the latter can confer certain meaning upon the meaningless world. The language of this late novel is, in Said’s terms, ‘neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else’, but ‘constitutive’.