The Immortal Woman

Chang debuts with a wrenching tale of a Chinese family’s search for freedom and self-acceptance. It begins in Shanghai at the start of the Cultural Revolution with Lemei, a bookish girl of 12 whose oafish 14-year-old brother, a Red Guard, has their intellectual father imprisoned in one of Mao’s notorious “cowsheds,” where he dies. Years later, while working as a journalist, Lemei is raped in her newspaper’s offices and impregnated. After failing to induce an abortion, she gives birth to her daughter, Lin, with the help of her mother. In May 1989, Lemei goes to Beijing to report on the Tiananmen Square protests, where she witnesses unspeakable violence and suffers a tragic loss. As a high school student in 2000, Lin wins a scholarship to study in the U.S., and she later becomes a playwright. After securing a residency in Toronto, Lin falls in love with a heavy-drinking white Canadian, with whom she gets pregnant before he abandons her and their baby. Though the plot tips into melodrama, Chang’s writing is powered by raw emotion, as she unflinchingly chronicles Lemei’s descent into madness and desperation to help Lin escape the horrors and privations she herself endured. It’s a cathartic account of a family buffeted by the winds of modern Chinese history. (Mar.)