“A poignant story of sisterly love and the search for self-knowledge in the face of considerable challenges....Beautifully woven family memories coalesce into a vivid history of two very different Chinas.”-KIRKUS REVIEW

Join Zhuqing Li for a discussion of her celebrated book, Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China's Civil War (W.W. Norton, 2022), a memoir about her two aunts whose lives, transformed by modern Chinese history, particularly the nation's split in 1949, have come to illustrate the intricate relationship between China and Taiwan. Registration is required.

Zhuqing will share her journey in trying to understand and construct the near-century-long-lives of her two maternal aunts, Jun and Hong. 
Each other’s best friend, they grew up in the 1930s during the final days of Old China before the tumult of the twentieth century brought political revolution and a fractured national identity. By a quirk of timing, at the end of the Chinese civil war, Jun ended up on an island under Nationalist control and then settled in Taiwan and lived among fellow exiles, at odds with everything the new Communist regime stood for on the mainland. Hong found herself an ocean away on the mainland, forced to publicly disavow both her own family background and her sister’s decision to abandon the party. Zhuqing Li is a visiting associate professor of East Asian Studies and faculty curator of East Asian Collections at the Brown University Library. Her main field of research is Chinese linguistics, especially dialectology. She has authored three academic books on Chinese linguistics and one on Chinese returnees.