From the author's website:

an "...evocative and intimate story of two rivalrous Chinese sisters, a writer and a doctor, who took very different paths in their quest to be independent women....Biographer Sasha Su-Ling Welland stumbled across their remarkable stories while recording her grandmother Ling Shuhao’s oral history.

Sasha Su-Ling Welland

Reserved for the Passport to the World Book Box

Really intriguing family story...I am now reading about 3 Chinese women aviators in the 1930's.
This book is now on the way to azuki in Florida.

Thanks. Received today with the lovely bookmark and bookplate.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, more than I expected from a "biography." However, part of it is because I grew up in Hong Kong, and some of the people mentioned, like Xu Zhimo and Bing Xin, are known to all students and their works required reading in schools. Even the group On Leong Tong is familiar as they still have chapters in the U.S., albeit for charity more than for shady businesses.

That aside, it's still a well written, well researched biography of two sisters living in a very unusual time in history. (not sure what is the right word: interesting or exciting time most certainly made light of the hardship of the wars.)

The author quoted John Dewey, an American philosopher from Columbia University: "To think of kids in our country from fourteen on, taking the lead in starting a big cleanup reform politics movement... This is sure some country." Dewey was commenting on the movement when on May 4 1919, over three thousand students gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest the Versailles Treaty. This reminded me of another student protest in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, and then the one in Hong Kong in 2014 which was indeed started by high school students, who went on strike and occupied the streets (where they continued to study sitting on crates and blankets.) It seems like it is a long tradition indeed.

Another interesting fact that impressed me was that in 1902 Kang Youwei, a reformer, presented the idea that "homosexuals and heterosexuals alike should be permitted to sign short-term, renewable marriage contracts." Makes you realize we may not actually be as progressed as our ancestors!!

Putting into the Far East Bookbox.

Received this in the Asian bookbox. I love stories of people's lives, and particularly learning women's experience around the world (though Chinese women have it tough, compared to my modern life.)

Wow, what a wonderful book! It's pretty dense, so it took me a while to get through it, but I loved it. It's based around two women, both pretty different, but it's true, so it's not full of all that myth making and sentiment around traditional Chinese life. Instead, they lived at a moment of change for women: they knew people with bound feet, their family had more than one wife, and a bunch of concubines. Yet, they are living on their own, figuring out how to be mostly independent, thinking for themselves. It's very interesting and the author is to be commended for giving us so much of the historical context, the literary life, her deep consideration of what was really meant when the record is vague and ambivalent.

I'm going to pass along to a friend with a lifelong interest in China. Highly recommended.

I hope you enjoy your new book. A great way to travel halfway around the world, without necessarily leaving home.