In the summer of 1949, young Chen Wenjun (“Jun”) stepped off a ferry in Jinmen, an island off the coast of southeastern China. She did not know that the Communists’ People’s Liberation Army (P.L.A.) had occupied Fuzhou, her home city, the night after she left. But in Jinmen, the anti-Communist Nationalists held their territory. None of the 9,000 P.L.A. soldiers who fought on Jinmen’s beaches made it back home. Neither did Jun, who now effectively lived in a different country from her family. Jun’s short visit to a friend quickly became a long exile.
“Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden,” written by Jun’s niece, Zhuqing Li, a professor of East Asian studies at Brown, tells the riveting story of Jun’s decades-long struggle to find her way home. Li begins in the Flower Fragrant Garden, a lavish compound in Fuzhou overlooking the Min River, where Jun lived happily with her father, a powerful salt commissioner, his two wives and their children. One of those children was another of Li’s aunts, Hong (a pseudonym), whose story Li skillfully braids with that of Jun. Li does not linger on the Chens’ peaceful “hilltop aerie,” as the turmoil of 20th-century China soon catches up to the family and plunges it into poverty.
