A Thousand Miles of Dreams
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1wandering_star
I got an invitation today to the launch of A Thousand Miles Of Dreams by Sasha Su-Ling Welland - at 3pm, 3 December, Brunei Gallery (off Russell Sq). It's a public launch, so anyone can turn up.
The book sounds fascinating - I'd really like to hear from anyone who's read it:
"A Thousand Miles of Dreams is an evocative and intimate biography of two Chinese sisters who took very different paths in their quest to be independent women. Ling Shuhao arrived in Cleveland in 1925 to study medicine in the middle of a U.S. crackdown on Chinese immigrant communities, and her effort to assimilate began. She became an American named Amy, while her sister Ling Shuhua burst onto the Beijing literary scene as a writer of short fiction. Shuhua's tumultuous affair with Virginia Woolfs nephew during his years in China eventually drew her into the orbit of the Bloomsbury group. The sisters were Chinese modern girls who sought to forge their own way in an era of social revolution that unsettled relations between men and women, and among nations. Daughters of an imperial scholar-official and a concubine, the two sisters followed professional trajectories unimaginable to their parents generation.
Biographer Sasha Su-Ling Welland stumbled across their remarkable stories while recording her grandmother's oral history. She discovered the secret Amy had jealously hidden from family in the U.S. her sister's fame as a Chinese woman writer as well as intriguing discrepancies in the sisters versions of the past. Shaped by the social history of their day, the journeys of these extraordinary women spanned the twentieth century and three continents in a saga of East-West cultural exchange and personal struggle."
The book sounds fascinating - I'd really like to hear from anyone who's read it:
"A Thousand Miles of Dreams is an evocative and intimate biography of two Chinese sisters who took very different paths in their quest to be independent women. Ling Shuhao arrived in Cleveland in 1925 to study medicine in the middle of a U.S. crackdown on Chinese immigrant communities, and her effort to assimilate began. She became an American named Amy, while her sister Ling Shuhua burst onto the Beijing literary scene as a writer of short fiction. Shuhua's tumultuous affair with Virginia Woolfs nephew during his years in China eventually drew her into the orbit of the Bloomsbury group. The sisters were Chinese modern girls who sought to forge their own way in an era of social revolution that unsettled relations between men and women, and among nations. Daughters of an imperial scholar-official and a concubine, the two sisters followed professional trajectories unimaginable to their parents generation.
Biographer Sasha Su-Ling Welland stumbled across their remarkable stories while recording her grandmother's oral history. She discovered the secret Amy had jealously hidden from family in the U.S. her sister's fame as a Chinese woman writer as well as intriguing discrepancies in the sisters versions of the past. Shaped by the social history of their day, the journeys of these extraordinary women spanned the twentieth century and three continents in a saga of East-West cultural exchange and personal struggle."
