A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters
Sasha Su-Ling Welland, . . Rowman & Littlefield, $24.95 (369pp) ISBN 978-0-7425-5313-2
Welland, a lecturer in anthropology and women's studies at the University of Washington–Seattle, reconstructs the lives of her elite Cantonese grandmother, Amy Ling Chen, who in 1925 won a scholarship to study medicine in the United States, and of Amy's elder sister, Ling Shuhua, a writer and painter who remained in China until 1945. Welland balances family sources with meticulous research and insightful reading of Shuhua's fiction. Describing the anti-Communist paramilitary violence targeting Chinese "modern girls" that precipitated Amy's emigration, Welland charts her grandmother's courageous years as a medical intern and her subsequent pursuit of all-American respectability after marriage to a successful Chinese researcher. Welland also recounts Shuhua's frustrated existence as a faculty wife and struggling writer at Wuhan University, sensitively examining records of Shuhua's affair with visiting British lecturer Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf's nephew. Welland also tracks Shuhua's tenuous postwar relationship to the Bloomsbury Group (Julian Bell having died in the Spanish Civil War) and the genesis of her memoir
Reviewed on: 07/17/2006
Genre: Nonfiction
Hardcover - 60 pages - 978-0-366-34493-2
Open Ebook - 392 pages - 978-1-4422-1006-6
Paperback - 392 pages - 978-0-7425-5314-9
Paperback - 62 pages - 978-0-366-34439-0