*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. Visit the author's website for more information and upcoming
events. http: //www.sashawelland.com/index.html
