This book is linked to a previous book by the author, 'Shanghai Girls'--but you don't need to have read one to read the other. They stand alone (and in fact it took me the first 1/4 of the book to remember that I actually knew the two older women in this book, Pearl and May, because their daughter/niece is the center of this book).
Joy is a niave girl in the late 1950's who dabbles in communist activism at a time when that was not just frowned upon, but actively pursued by a paranoid FBI and seen as sedition rather than youthful indiscretion. Her father is the first to pay the price for her choices, but that is really just the beginning.
In the aftermath of her father's death Joy finds out that her father is not her father and that her mother is her aunt (and vice-versa--her aunt is really her mother). The shock of them lying to her combined with her Chinese ancestry and infatuateion with communism propels her back to China in the midst of the Great Leap Forward.
Joy starts off optimistic. She finds that her father, while a famous artist, is also a persona non grata who has been sent to the country side for a little re-education. She accompanies him and then makes a fatal error. She falls for a country boy. Who she then marries. And it is seriously down hill from there for her. It takes a combined effort of her nuclear family to save her, and she travels the path that her aunt and mother before her did--leaving the mother land and going to the pormised land. The book is steeped in the culture and history of the time, all the while being a good piece of story telling.
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