Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden

April 1, 2022
A saga of the author's two Chinese aunts that mirrors the convulsive history of 20th-century China. A professor of East Asian studies at Brown University, Li chronicles the lives of her aunts Jun and Hong who grew up in "a home named the Flower Fragrant Garden, a spacious, verdant family compound, one of Fuzhou's biggest and richest homes." They were inseparable as girls in the 1930s, yet by the time of Mao's cataclysmic Cultural Revolution, they were forced to different sides of the political divide. In the early years, their family was prosperous: Li's grandfather was a former officer in the Nationalist Army; served as the province's salt commissioner, "a powerful, ancient position"; and had two wives, Upstairs Grandma, the biological mother of Jun and Hong; and Downstairs Grandma, mother of the author's mother. While Jun wanted to study to be a teacher, Hong was focused on becoming a doctor. However, following the Japanese invasion and ensuing civil war, their educations were continually disrupted and the family's tranquility shattered, ushering in an era of dislocation, violence, and famine. When the Nationalists were defeated and relocated to Taiwan, the bamboo curtain effectively sealed Jun, then working in Taiwan, off from the mainland. In the subsequent violence of the Cultural Revolution, Hong was forced into rural reeducation camps and hounded into renouncing all mention of her counterrevolutionary sister, who ran a successful import-export business in Taiwan. Hong was eventually rehabilitated as a successful women's doctor, and Li offers a moving portrait of the sisters' reunion after decades of separation. Throughout, the author capably narrates a poignant story of sisterly love and the search for self-knowledge in the face of considerable challenges: "These two remarkable and pioneering women...had fought and won against adversities that might have crushed less powerful, determined figures." Beautifully woven family memories coalesce into a vivid history of two very different Chinas.

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April 18, 2022
Li (Reinventing China), a professor of East Asian studies at Brown University, mixes family memoir and geopolitical history in this compassionate portrait of her two aunts, Hong and Jun Chen. In the book’s first half, Li documents the sisters’ privileged upbringing in the southeastern city of Fuzhou in the 1930s and explains how their plans—Hong yearned to become a doctor, while Jun wanted to teach—were disrupted by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. Twelve years later, during the height of the civil war between Communist and Nationalist forces, Jun took a trip to the island of Jinmen—“a fortress on Taiwan’s defensive front line”—to visit a friend. While she was away, Communist forces captured Fuzhou. Soon after, the U.S. Navy began patrolling the Taiwan Strait, “seal the separation of Taiwan from the Mainland, Jun from Hong.” Jun was recruited by the Nationalist party as a newspaper columnist and organizer, while Hong, a doctor at Fuzhou Hospital on the mainland, became the family breadwinner. The sisters endured years of deprivation, violence, and persecution before reuniting in 1982. Laced with frank reflections on the author’s own experience as a Chinese immigrant to the U.S., this is a poignant and intimate chronicle of the Chinese diaspora.

May 1, 2022

Li (East Asian studies, Brown Univ.) steps outside of her usual academic realm to share the intimate story of her two great aunts and their experience through the Chinese Civil War. The sisters came from an affluent background and enjoyed a blissful childhood until the tides of Chinese society began to turn in the late 1920s. Soon these two sisters found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict--one a doctor in Maoist China and the other on the sidelines of government support in Taiwan. Will they ever be able to reunite? Or has too much tragedy besieged them? This historical biography adds to the oeuvre of similar works (Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister and Wild Swans, both by Jung Chang) but is no less intriguing, as it's only since recently that these stories can be told with the dignity and honesty they deserve. Cinematic in scope, each sister goes through parallel epic sagas that are sure to entrance the reader. VERDICT A wonderful addition to any library that will appeal to a wide audience interested in historical narrative, Chinese history, family dynamics, and generally as a story of struggle against the odds.--Kelly Karst

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