DAUGHTERS OF THE FLOWER FRAGRANT GARDEN

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.