Where:
The Foundry - STEAM Set | Performance Space
101 Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA
Admission:
FREE
Categories:
Festivals & Fairs, Good for Groups, Lectures & Conferences, Meetup
Event website:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chinese-new-year-celebration-book-panel-and-discussion-tickets-508228694707?aff=erelexpmlt
Interactive book panel & discussion by Zhuqing Li, author of “ Daughters of the Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War"
Join this timely and fascinating book panel and discussion by Zhuqing Li, author of “Daughters of the Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War" and Professor of Asian Studies at Brown University, and Dr. Elaine Hsiang, retired physician whose prominent family was also separated by China’s civil war.
Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China's Civil War was published on June 21, 2022.
About the book:
Sisters separated by war forge new identities as they are forced to choose between family, nation, and their own independence.
Scions of a once-great southern Chinese family that produced the tutor of the last emperor, Jun and Hong were each other’s best friends until, in their twenties, they were separated by chance at the end of the Chinese Civil War. For the next thirty years, while one became a model Communist, the other a model capitalist, they could not even communicate.
On Taiwan, Jun married a Nationalist general, established an important trading company, and ultimately emigrated to the United States.
On the Communist mainland, Hong built her medical career under a cloud of suspicion about her family and survived two waves of “re-education” before she was acclaimed for her achievements.
Zhuqing Li recounts her aunts’ experiences with extraordinary sympathy and breathtaking storytelling. A microcosm of women’s lives in a time of traumatic change, this is a fascinating, evenhanded account of the recent history of separation between mainland China and Taiwan.
About the Author:
Li Zhuqing is a professor at Brown University and a faculty curator at the University’s Rockefeller Library. She is the author of four books in her academic discipline, but Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden, a longtime personal project, represents her first foray into family history and memoir. The book follows the extraordinary lives of her two maternal aunts, women whose experiences traced China’s journey through war and upheaval across three quarters of the last century.
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