Eve J. Chung Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Eve J. Chung speaks about her debut novel, Daughters of Shandong

This story is based on your grandmother's escape with her mother and sisters out of mainland China during the Chinese Communist Revolution in the late 1940s. Can you tell us more?

When I was a child, I watched my grandmother use a heat lamp on her knees every night. She did this while watching Chinese period dramas, and I didn't think much of it. My grandmother was a hoarder of food (and almost everything else), and was always paranoid that my cousins and I were too frail, despite all of us being medically overweight. As an adult, I realized that many of her quirks were the result of trauma. After her father abandoned her, along with her mother and sisters, in mainland China, my grandmother lived on the brink of starvation until she made it to Taiwan. Her knees were irreparably damaged from kneeling on the ice during denunciation rallies run by the Communists, and she had liver disease from malnutrition. Though the story is told from my grandmother's point of view, the heroine is really my great-grandmother, who once had bound feet, yet still managed to drag three daughters through war-torn China and track down the husband who left them all behind.

This is your first novel. What inspired you to write it?

Daughters of Shandong was a...