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

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[ing] 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)