Nestled on the periphery of southern China, tiny Macao has offered profuse inspiration for Deolinda da Conceicao (a Macanese) and Maria Ondina Braga (a Portuguese) to draw up narratives about the Chinese. Translated and collected in Visions of China: Stories from Macau, a series of their short stories vividly recount the predicaments and struggles of the common people. These two female writers are expressly concerned with downtrodden women’s forlorn fates. Despondent characters from wide-ranging social strata are narrativised against the war-ravaged, poverty-stricken backdrop when post-imperial China was mired in socio-political turmoil, coinciding with a full-scale invasion launched by Japan. The main heroines discussed are: a westernised nightclub hostess, an educated wife from America, an illiterate barefoot mistress, a disillusioned slavegirl, an ignorant firecracker worker, a ghostly mad widow, a doomed leper girl and a saintly Buddhist avenger. These dramatis personae are either oppressed and discriminated against in a patriarchal system, or entrapped in the bottom part of a hierarchical society. Not least, others exist at the outer fringes of the lowest social echelon. Through the eyes of these two authors, we can see in their ‘women’s writing’ a dismal tapestry of hapless women woven together in a historic period of time when Macao was destined to be a refugee haven.