I have spent many years studying and working in and on China. Of late, we have seen so much hype in Western media about China, it has become difficult to find books or articles offering an authentic insight and understanding of what is modern China and how it became what it is today.
This outstanding book by a Chinese American academic - written about her family's experiences living in mainland China and Taiwan since 1949 - is a wonderful exception. By telling the story of her two aunts (Hong and Jun) and their very different parallel lives (one in the PRC the other in Taiwan), Zhu Qing Li lays out for us how each lived over fifty years in each place. By researching their stories so painstakingly - including extensive interviews with them - she has documented those lives in most authentic way, so they come to life.
Because the book was written primarily as a family history, not a political or economic thesis, the spotlight is placed upon the very accomplished lives of her two aunts as family leaders as well as career women.
In 1949, through a freak of fate, one aunt who becomes a noted doctor (Hong) has to stay in the PRC. She witnesses at first hand the highly ideological and repressive opening decades of China under Mao. She is subjected to restrictions on her life and career - not only as a woman, but also because she came from a "bourgeois" (consequently suspect) family. She is banished to a remote village for re-education during the Cultural Revolution. But at each stage she comes through because of her skill as a physician, her political savvy, and her sheer persistence. Eventually she rises to a high position in the medical profession in the PRC.
The other aunt (Jun) finds herself cut off in Taiwan when the Communist takeover of Fuzhou (a major southern coastal city where the family has lived for generations) happens while she is on a two weeks vacation visit to a friend in Jinmen - a small island off the coast that remains part of Taiwan. She marries a former general in Chiang Kai Shek's army, has a family, but her husband wisely realizes she needs a career to realize her own self worth. So she starts a trading company importing transport equipment from the West. Through her skills and ability she builds her business to great success.
The two sisters - separated by the complete isolation of China from Taiwan - are unable to be in contact with each other for over forty years. Despite this, in a very Asian way, their sense of family remains fundamental to their lives. Both are leaders in the two halves of their family now separated from each other. They watch over, support and help the older and younger generations in their extended family.
Eventually they are reunited only after forty-three years, with the 1992 normalization agreement opening up relations between the PRC and Taiwan. Once this happens, they take on new roles in the family : Jun helps young family members (from Taiwan and from the mainland) go to university - including to study in the USA - and eventually moves to Maryland to provide a home for them while they study. Hong meanwhile climbs to the pinnacle of her profession in the PRC.
But this is above all a family story and one of the great cultural transformation and modernization that came about in Chinese society with the advent of the People's Republic : arranged marriages and child marriages were banned, Hong and Jun's grand-mother is in the last generation of women to have their feet bound (a practice that was banned). Taiwan is transformed politically and socially with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people from Shanghai and other coastal cities in Chiang Kai Shek's retreating army. These newcomers take over running Taiwan from the locals - but for decades maintain their dream of returning to take back the mainland from Mao.
By telling this long and rich tapestry of a family history in such a compelling personal way - focusing on family not on politics - but explaining how the family lived through the earth shaking political changes - the book does a far better job enlightening us about the reality of those changes, than many politically focused studies.
In a field today so fraught with controversy as China studies, this is a major achievement. We have to thank Prof. Li for the gift she has given us.
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