Their Divine Fires
A Novel
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- USD 13.99
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- USD 13.99
Publisher Description
A captivating and intimate debut novel interwoven with folktale and myth, Wendy Chen’s Their Divine Fires tells the story of the love affairs of three generations of Chinese women across one hundred years of revolutions both political and personal.
In 1917, at the dawn of the Chinese revolution, Yunhong is growing up in the southern china countryside and falls deeply in love with the son of a wealthy landlord despite her brother’s objections. On the night of her wedding, her brother destroys the marriage, irrevocably changing the shape of Yunhong’s family to come: her daughter, Yuexin, will never know her father. Haunted by a history that she does not understand, Yuexin passes on those memories to her daughters Hongxing and Yonghong, who come of age in the years following Mao’s death, battling the push and pull of political forces as they forge their own paths. Each generation guards its secrets, leaving Emily, great-granddaughter of Yunhong and living in contemporary America, to piece together what actually happened between her mother and her aunt, and the weight of their shared ancestry.
Drawing on the lives of her great-grandmother and her great-uncles—both of whom fought on the side of the Communists—as well as her mother’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution, Wendy Chen infuses this gorgeous debut with a passion that will transport the reader back to powerful moments in history while bringing us close to the women who persisted despite the forces all around them. Both brilliant and haunting, it’s a story about what our ancestors will, and won’t, tell us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chen debuts with a poignant saga of a Chinese family's heartbreak and loss over nearly a century. In 1927, Yunghong Zhang, the daughter of a doctor in rural southern China, marries Haiyang, the son of a local lord. Soon thereafter, her happiness is cut short when her two older brothers participate in the peasant revolution, resulting in Haiyang's death during a raid on his family's house. Yunghong, pregnant with Haiyang's daughter, returns to her family, who raise her daughter, Yuexin, as the child of a distant cousin, futilely hoping Yunghong will marry again. At school Yuexin is called a "bastard" by her classmates, and after Yunghong tells Yuexin the truth about her origins, she resents her mother for keeping them a secret. During the Cultural Revolution, Yuexin gives birth to twins Hongxing, who becomes an actress, and Yonghong, whose first love dies after being assigned grueling farm work by the government. In the 1990s, Yonghong moves to Boston and has a daughter while Hongxing unhappily stays in China, where in 2018 she's persecuted after falling in love with a woman. Chen's sprawling narrative provides a wrenching window onto the ways in which a family is torn apart by political upheaval. This will move readers.
