In their negotiations of interracial romantic relationships, both Jade Island and Pearl Moon construct conflicts between "East" and "West." The Asian heroines of both texts have been traumatized by what the novels present as Chinese culture and its anticapitalist leanings. In both novels, the Chinese family and community functions as a regressive past in which individual desires and feelings are painfully oppressed, and defined roles are marked by an extreme enforcement of gender inequality. Stone and Lowell construct "Asianness" as something that must be rescued from itself. Jade Island and Pearl Moon are essentially narratives of progress, in which the Chinese community may offer security at the expense of freedom, but the British or American community (and corporation) has the ability to offer more satisfactory versions of both. (206)