Beyond the Narrow Gate: The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America

Sketching the lives of four Chinese women--her mother and her mother's three classmates from Taiwan's most prestigious high school--Chang earnestly attempts to discern how they survived the transition from China to Taiwan in 1948 and then to the U.S., where they married or pursued careers, resisting and yielding to American culture in varying degrees. As the author writes, ""only in America could their choices and circumstances have carried them to such different futures even as the past continued to connect them."" Chang's own story involves the refusal of the immigrating generation to grant the subsequent generation full knowledge of the past. She tells convincingly of her frustration with both the content of the women's stories and the manner in which they were told, and of the inevitable conflicts of living an American life occasionally pierced by the tragedy of the Chinese civil war, which her mother barely survived. Chang's novelistic portrayals may leave readers wondering how much she has blurred the line between fiction and journalism, and are occasionally at odds with the more straightforward passages of exposition. Some of the questions Chang poses show her to be as American as anyone who might have written this book (at one point, she describes Mao as ""panda-like""). Still, her account may help ground those who don't know the tale of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, and offers an appealingly intimate portrait of how an educated Chinese class has attempted to preserve itself. Agent, Mary Evans. (May)