Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China's Civil War

by Zhuqing Li

Overview

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“Exceptional…[A] gripping narrative of one family divided by the ‘bamboo curtain.’” —Deirdre Mask, New York Times Book Review

Sisters separated by war forge new identities as they are forced to choose between family, nation, and their own independence.

Jun and Hong were scions of a once great southern Chinese family. Each other’s best friend, they grew up in the 1930s during the final days of Old China before the tumult of the twentieth century brought political revolution, violence, and a fractured national identity. By a quirk of timing, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Jun ended up on an island under Nationalist control, and then settled in Taiwan, married a Nationalist general, and lived among fellow exiles at odds with everything the new Communist regime stood for on the mainland. Hong found herself an ocean away on the mainland, forced to publicly disavow both her own family background and her sister’s decision to abandon the party. A doctor by training, to overcome the suspicion created by her family circumstances, Hong endured two waves of “re-education” and internal exile, forced to work in some of the most desperately poor, remote areas of the country.

Ambitious, determined, and resourceful, both women faced morally fraught decisions as they forged careers and families in the midst of political and social upheaval. Jun established one of U.S.-allied Taiwan’s most important trading companies. Hong became one of the most celebrated doctors in China, appearing on national media and honored for her dedication to medicine. Niece to both sisters, linguist and East Asian scholar Zhuqing Li tells her aunts’ story for the first time, honoring her family’s history with sympathy and grace. Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden is a window into the lives of women in twentieth-century China, a time of traumatic change and unparalleled resilience. In this riveting and deeply personal account, Li confronts the bitter political rivals of mainland China and Taiwan with elegance and unique insight, while celebrating her aunts’ remarkable legacies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324064398
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/25/2023
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	134,430
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Zhuqing Li is a professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University and the author of four scholarly books on Chinese linguistics. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Table of Contents

Author's Note viii

Prologue ix

Part I The Garden 3

Expelled 15

Part II Leaving 47

The East Is Red 67

Adrift 97

Beyond the Hospital Wall 117

Arriving in Taiwan 134

"Continue the Leap" 164

Part III Re-education 179

"It's Our Home" 217

"The Big Muscle" 231

Midnight Train to Gaoxiong (Kaohsiung) 257

The Past That Refused to Fade 277

Part IV Setting Sail 287

Stepping-Stone 295

"No Tears for Today!" 304

Into a New World 321

Epilogue 347

Acknowledgments 351

Editorial Reviews

"A heartrending story, beautifully told, about the struggles and triumphs of two sisters separated by the Taiwan Strait, but united in their determination to pursue meaningful lives amid political upheaval. I couldn’t stop reading it."

Amy Stanley

"With sensitivity and sincerity, Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden takes readers through the most complicated, difficult, sorrowful, and indecipherable years in China’s modern history. Zhuqing Li’s beautifully narrated family stories are tightly entangled with the wider historical context unfolding on a magnificent scale, and evoke unique feelings of pain and helplessness that belong to that era."

Ai Weiwei

"Beginning in war-torn China, Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden tells a compelling story about diaspora, root-seeking, and the triumph of familial love and human perseverance."

David Wang

"In gorgeous prose, Zhuqing Li tells a story that is at once distinctive and familiar, of Chinese families of a certain generation that lived through wars, revolutions, separations, and reunions. I couldn’t put it down. A lovely book."

Mae Ngai

"Zhuqing Li has captured the agonizing struggle of late-twentieth-century Chinese history within the microcosm of her own extraordinary family. This is a tale of accidental exile, capitalism and communism, medicine and mercantilism, lifelong nostalgia and willful forgetting, and the breathtaking resilience of two sisters, Li’s indomitable aunts. How lucky we are that their niece has the skill and devotion to tell their story so well."

Janice P. Nimura

"[Li] recounts this real-life saga of rupture and reunion in propulsive, poignant detail. The book’s gripping narrative reveals the devastating human cost of the Chinese Revolution and will resonate, in particular, with anyone whose family has been severed by political events…The author’s perspective, from having lived both inside and outside the People’s Republic of China, yields exceptional insight into her aunts’ personal histories and the constantly shifting political vicissitudes they endured. She unspools the unexpected, accidental swerves each life took with spellbinding grace. Here, in the pages of her book, she has knit together the family story as it was lived in both Chinas."

Wall Street Journal - Diane Cole

"Zhuqing Li has written a compelling book about family secrets, Cold War politics, and the emotional consequences of displacement…By interweaving the perspectives of its two protagonists, Li emphasizes the persistence of family ties in the face of political and geographical distance, and the disappointment and culture shock that can accompany a long-anticipated reunion."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Tobie Meyer-Fong

"A very personal story informed by a scholarly set of interests…[I]t’s a memoir and family history, driven by the author’s interest in figuring out the things that the family didn’t talk about."

Fivebooks.com - Jeffrey Wasserstrom

"At last, a profoundly human story that illuminates the staggering personal consequences of China and Taiwan’s historic split—from both sides. Rare is the author who can portray war and its aftermath so evenhandedly. This powerful page-turner of a family torn apart—and surviving—is as unforgettable as it is important."

Nicole Mones

04/18/2022

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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Zhuqing Li has captured the agonizing struggle of late-twentieth-century Chinese history within the microcosm of her own extraordinary family. This is a tale of accidental exile, capitalism and communism, medicine and mercantilism, lifelong nostalgia and willful forgetting, and the breathtaking resilience of two sisters, Li’s indomitable aunts. How lucky we are that their niece has the skill and devotion to tell their story so well."

Janice Nimura

"With sensitivity and sincerity, Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden takes readers through the most complicated, difficult, sorrowful, and indecipherable years in China’s modern history."

Ai Wei Wei

"Exceptional...Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden is not a history of Taiwan-China relations, but in telling this gripping narrative of one family divided by the ‘bamboo curtain,’ Li sheds light on how Taiwan came to be — and why China might one day risk everything to take it."

New York Times - Deirdre Mask

05/01/2022

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

Library Journal

2022-03-10
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.

Kirkus Reviews