This event is part of the MetroWest Readers Fest ONE Read of Gish Jen’s Thank You Mr. Nixon. More info and events available here.
About the book:
Sisters separated by war forge new identities as they are forced to choose between family, nation, and their own independence.
Scions of a once-great southern Chinese family that produced the tutor of the last emperor, Jun and Hong were each other’s best friends until, in their twenties, they were separated by chance at the end of the Chinese Civil War. For the next thirty years, while one became a model Communist, the other a model capitalist, they could not even communicate.
On Taiwan, Jun married a Nationalist general, established an important trading company, and ultimately emigrated to the United States.
On the Communist mainland, Hong built her medical career under a cloud of suspicion about her family and survived two waves of “re-education” before she was acclaimed for her achievements.
Zhuqing Li recounts her aunts’ experiences with extraordinary sympathy and breathtaking storytelling. A microcosm of women’s lives in a time of traumatic change, this is a fascinating, evenhanded account of the recent history of separation between mainland China and Taiwan.
About the author:
Li Zhuqing is a professor at Brown University and a faculty curator at the University’s Rockefeller Library. She is the author of four books in her academic discipline, but Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden, a longtime personal project, represents her first foray into family history and memoir. The book follows the extraordinary lives of her two maternal aunts, women whose experiences traced China’s journey through war and upheaval across three quarters of the last century.
Zhuqing was born in Fuzhou, the capital city of Fujian province on China’s Southeast coast. The daughter of university professors, she spent many of her childhood years shuttled from one relative to another given that her parents had been exiled to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, for part of that period, Zhuqing herself was sent to the countryside to be with her parents. By the time they were able to return to the city to resume their teaching, she was already in middle school. Then, at age 16, Zhuqing attended Zhongshan University, a 36-hour train ride from home.
This disjointed life continued once Zhuqing graduated from university and was assigned by the state to teach English at a local college. Though she hoped to continue on to graduate school in China, her employer forbade it and refused to provide permission.
It was at that point that Aunt Jun, a relative from Taiwan who she never even knew existed, returned to China for a visit, and ultimately provided her a path to attend graduate school in the United States. Zhuqing would ultimately go on to earn a PhD in Asian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington.
Academic studies are systematic and logical, yet for Zhuqing, they cannot explain life’s randomness and disjointedness. It is that intermixing of fate and human agency that is so central to the story of Zhuqing’s aunts presented in Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden. For more about Zhuqing visit lizhuqing.com.