Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

Overview

An epic saga of forbidden love that spans decades, cultures, and continents. Cloud Mountain is based on the true story of Aimee Liu's grandparents, a Chinese Scholar-Revolutionary and his American teacher, whose courtship blooms during the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and whose life together in China carries them through the Warlord Era and the beginning of WWII.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625361370
Publisher:	Jessfield Press
Publication date:	06/01/2019
Sold by:	INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	511
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Aimee Liu's work includes the novels Flash House, Face, and Glorious Boy (to be published in 2020), as well as the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a past president of PEN USA and a current member of the faculty of Goddard College's MFA program in creative writing at Port Townsend, WA. She lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

From Chinese-American writer Liu (Face, 1994, etc.), a riveting, bittersweet second novel about a marriage tested by race, culture, and history as an American woman and her Chinese husband navigate the treacherous waters of politics in the pre-Mao years.

Loosely based on Liu's own grandparents' experience, the story begins in 1941 when Hope Newfield, living in Los Angeles, receives a three-year-old letter from her husband in China asking if she still has a place in her heart for him. The letter moves Hope to look back over the events that brought the couple together and tore them apart. They had met in 1906, when she was living in Oakland and tutoring Chinese students. Leong Po-yo, a new pupil, is the only son of a noble family and a follower of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Teacher and student are soon attracted to each other, and when Leong rescues Hope after the 1906 earthquake, they admit their love and decide to marry. They do so in Evanston, Wyoming, one of the few towns that allows "mixed" marriages, but they're quickly subject to racial slurs from both Americans and Chinese. Still, life is sweet, and the first of several children are born; but then, in 1911, revolution breaks out in China and Leong hurries back, followed shortly by Hope. From then on, their lives are shaped by Leong's political activities. Hope becomes a photographer and journalist; she and her children are shunned by both Chinese and European society. The marriage is further tested when China is pulled apart by civil war. Dispirited, Hope returns with her children to California in 1932, and though she goes back in 1942 in response to Leong's letter, she accepts that the two of them, victims of time and place, will always be "separate and distinct."

A moving tale of true love, besieged by politics and prejudice, that nonetheless survives the tumultuous times Liu so vividly and intelligently describes.

Kirkus Reviews