Daughters of the Fragrant Flower Garden
Jun and Hong were sisters separated by civil war. Just before Mao Zedong’s Communists consolidated their hold on China in 1949, one sister took a ferry to an offshore island for a teaching job. When the port across the channel fell to Mao, she was cut off on an island controlled by Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist Nationalists. Despite a family background that labelled her a “class enemy,” the other sister remained on the mainland. Her skills as a physician gained her employment under the Communist regime, albeit she had to attend “thought reform” sessions and master a new vocabulary of slogans and rhetoric.
Jun and Hong’s niece, a professor of East Asian studies at Brown University, recounts their lives as evocatively and descriptively as a novelist. The two sisters led parallel lives of ambition and success under entirely different systems and were only reunited after decades of separation. Daughters of the Fragrant Flower Garden arrives at a time of renewed tension between Communist China and the defiant offshore islands that evolved into the democracy based on Taiwan.
