A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters (Asian Voices) - Hardcover

Welland, Sasha Su-Ling

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0742553132 ISBN 13: 9780742553132

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006

Synopsis

*For the bibliography mentioned in the book, click here.

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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About this title

About the Author

Sasha Su-Ling Welland has woven together the remarkable lives of her grandmother and great-aunt in this biography. She is assistant professor of anthropology and women studies at the University of Washington.

Review

Filled with fascinating glimpses of twentieth-century Chinese women's intellectual history and insights into the Chinese-American and Anglo-Chinese experience. (Publishers Weekly)

Welland is an anthropologist with a novelist's eye for the art of both making lives and making books. She weaves biography, memoir, genealogy, social history, literary criticism, and theoretical reflection coherently, accessibly, and, indeed, beautifully. (Booklist, Starred Review)

Welland wisely refrains from intruding on the narration, allowing her fascinating topic to speak for itself. Scholarly and 'serious' in its depth and breadth of research, Welland's book is also highly readable and full of rich detail. . . . This is a book that enlightens as much as it delights and remains with you long after the reading. (The Seattle Times)

Welland skillfully navigates the murky waters of memory, exaggeration, cultural misunderstanding and transformed identity, with both a scholar's critical eye and a granddaughter's desire to believe. (Honolulu Advertiser)

Fascinating . . . Sasha Welland has produced a wonderful book from the lives of these two strong sisters. (Times Literary Supplement)

An intriguing and memorable study. . . . We have been told the lives of two powerful and interesting women . . . both determined to surmount as best they could the restrictions placed on women's lives. (Peter Stansky Virginia Woolf Miscellany)

Biographies are said to narrate the life of an individual. In this multi-layered work, Sasha Su-Ling Welland accomplishes much more, as she relates a complex story of re-creations, self-discovery, and selective memories. . . . [A] well-written and valuable work, especially for the many interesting points that it makes on the intricacies of cultural encounters, usages of the past, and exoticism. (Valentina Boretti, University of London H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online)

Welland's forebears could fairly be called trailblazing, and . . . she deftly shows how their lives mingled with history. (The Instrumentalist)

The author of A Thousand Miles of Dreams intersperses the accounts of the two sisters' lives in alternate chapters, thus providing a fascinating comparison of experiences in these distant countries and contrasting cultures as the Second World War loomed. (Michael Sheringham Asian Affairs)

Remarkable. . . . A coming-of-age account of the Ling sisters, Welland's book . . . reveal[s] new insights about the role of Chinese women as it changed not only in China but also the West. . . . A well-crafted and lively book that is sure to capture the imagination of lay readers and scholars alike. (International Examiner)

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0742553132
• ISBN 13: 9780742553132
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 392