A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780742553132)

A Thousand Miles of Dreams is an evocative and intimate biography of two Chinese sisters who took very different paths in their quests 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 Woolf's 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, they followed 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 United States--her sister's fame as a Chinese woman writer--as well as intriguing discrepancies between 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.

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Author: Sasha Su-Ling Welland
ISBN-10: 0742553132
ISBN-13: 9780742553132
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Language: English
Published: 09/08/2006
Pages: 392
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.52lbs
Size: 9.32h x 6.40w x 1.06d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/17/2006 pg. 153
Booklist 08/01/2006 pg. 33
Booklist Editors Choice/Adult 01/01/2007 pg. 7