The Four Sisters of Hofei - Softcover

Chin, Annping

9780747560081: The Four Sisters of Hofei

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747560080 ISBN 13: 9780747560081

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2002

Not since Wild Swans has Chinese history been so intimately encountered - through the stories of four sisters born between 1907 and 1914, a renowned historian examines a century of extraordinary change in Chinese culture and in women's lives. Now in their late eighties and early nineties, the four Chang sisters lived through a century of historic change in China. In this extraordinary work, assembled with the benefit of letters, diaries, family histories, poetry, journals and interviews, Annping Chin shapes the story of one family into a riveting chronicle that provides a unique insight into the old China and its transition into the new. From their father, the Chang sisters inherited reason and a belief in the virtues of modern education. From their mother they learned about the human spirit and the art of finding an appropriate path. The nurse-nannies - uneducated widows from the Hofei countryside - contributed their own opinions on modern ways. As the sisters grow up, one breaks with tradition to marry an actor, another marries one of China's greatest novelists; another, raised by her devout Buddhist grandaunt, is taught to be a rigorous practitioner of China's classical arts. The Chang sisters' prolific correspondence provides an intimate glimpse of private life, as well as a chronicle of the developments of the twentieth century, from prosperity to persecution, from foreign wars to Cultural Revolution. Four Sisters of Hofei is an intensely personal and sweeping story that illustrates the complex history of a complex culture.

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From the Publisher:

An Intimate account of China in the last century told through the lives of four exceptional sisters. With the detail and narrative skill of Stella Tillyard's 'Aristocrats' and James Fox's 'The Langhorne Sisters'.

AnnPing Chin's writing provides a visual description of Chinese life similar to that of Bertolucci's 'Last Emperor'.

About the Author:

Ann Ping Chin was born in Taiwan in 1950. Her family moved to America in 1962. The author of CHILDREN OF CHINA, based on interviews with children living in the People's Republic of China, and co-author with her husband Jonathan Spence of CHINESE CENTURY: A Photographic History of the Last Hundred Years. She currently teaches in the history department at Yale University.

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