In Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden, Zhuqing Li writes of how her two aunts' lives were shaped by the events of the Chinese Civil War. One of them, Jun, ended up living in Taiwan after the war, married to a general from the losing side, the Nationalists, who ruled the island after the Communists took over the mainland.

The relationship between China and Taiwan dates back at least to the third century AD, when the Chinese emperor sent a legion of explorers there. The island became a Dutch colony briefly in the 17th century, after which it came under the control of the Chinese Qing Dynasty. Chinese migrants flooded into the area in the years that followed, until 1895, when the First Sino-Japanese War ended and Taiwan became a territory of the victorious Japanese. When the Axis powers lost World War II, Taiwan was returned to China.

After the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party (called the Kuomintang) Chiang Kai-shek and over one ...