GRACE: An American Woman in China: 1934–1974

"May you live in interesting times" goes the Chinese blessing, especially apt for the life of Grace Divine Liu (1901–1979), a Tennessee native who, while living in China, witnessed the Japanese occupation, the Communist revolution, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. As this biography by Grace's cousin Cooper and her son Liu explains, Grace's own leap from Chattanooga, Tenn., to China began in 1926, when she moved to Manhattan at the age of 25 to pursue a singing career. There she met Liu Fu-chi, a Chinese engineering student at Cornell. The improbable couple nearly broke up under pressure from the two disapproving families, but ended up marrying and raising three children in his native land. They lived in the foreign-controlled territory of Tientsin, where Grace was one of a handful of Westerners to watch semicolonial China melt away and, later, to see all things Western or "bourgeois" purged under Mao. When her husband died in 1955, she supported herself by teaching English at Nankai University, and was briefly arrested during the Cultural Revolution for corresponding with foreign academics. Told mostly through Grace's captivating, humorous letters and the articles she wrote for American newspapers and journals, the book sketches Grace's daily life and her changing views of the Communist government. It reveals a life of remarkable good cheer despite harassment, chronic food rationing and illness. B&w photos. (Jan.)