Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden by Zhuqing Li
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.
Zhuqing was born in Fuzhou, the capital city of Fujian province on China’s Southeast coast. The daughter of university professors, she spent many of her childhood years shuttled from one relative to another given that her parents had been exiled to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, for part of that period, Zhuqing herself was sent to the countryside to be with her parents. By the time they were able to return to the city to resume their teaching, she was already in middle school. Then, at age 16, Zhuqing attended Zhongshan University, a 36-hour train ride from home. This disjointed life continued once Zhuqing graduated from university and was assigned by the state to teach English at a local college. Though she hoped to continue on to graduate school in China, her employer forbade it and refused to provide permission.
It was at that point that Aunt Jun, a relative from Taiwan who she never even knew existed, returned to China for a visit, and ultimately provided her a path to attend graduate school in the United States. Zhuqing would ultimately go on to earn a PhD in Asian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington.
Academic studies are systematic and logical, yet for Zhuqing, they cannot explain life’s randomness and disjointedness. It is that intermixing of fate and human agency that is so central to the story of Zhuqing’s aunts presented in Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden.
Review
Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden – Two sisters separated by China’s civil war. March 9, 2022, Kirkus Reviews
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 tranquillity 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 re-education camps and hounded into renouncing all mention of her counter-revolutionary 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.