Part I The Garden -- Expelled -- Part II Leaving -- The East Is Red -- Adrift -- Beyond the Hospital Walls -- Arriving in Taiwan -- "Continue the Leap" -- Part III Re- education -- "It's Our Home" -- "The Big Muscle" -- Midnight Train to Gaoxiong (Kaohsiong) -- The Past That Refused to Fade -- Part IV Setting Sail -- Stepping- Stone -- "No Tears for Today!" -- Into a New World

"Sisters separated by war forge new identities as they are forced to choose between family, nation, and their own independence. Scions of a once-great southern Chinese family that produced the tutor of the last emperor, Jun and Hong were each other's best friends until, in their twenties, they were separated by chance at the end of the Chinese Civil War. For the next thirty years, while one became a model Communist, the other a model capitalist, they could not even communicate. On Taiwan, Jun married a Nationalist general, established an important trading company, and ultimately emigrated to the United States. On the Communist mainland, Hong built her medical career under a cloud of suspicion about her family and survived two waves of "re-education" before she was acclaimed for her achievements. Zhuqing Li recounts her aunts' experiences with extraordinary sympathy and breathtaking storytelling. A microcosm of women's lives in a time of traumatic change, this is a fascinating, evenhanded account of the recent history of separation between mainland China and Taiwan"--