Real-Life Inspirations for Daughters of Shandong: Background information when reading Daughters of Shandong

Eve J. Chung's debut novel Daughters of Shandong focuses on the mother and daughters of a landowning family who flee China for Taiwan as a result of the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Chung has spoken about how she was motivated to write the book by her maternal grandmother's experiences of that period of history.

However, what became a work of fiction started as a simple attempt to record her family's past. In a note to readers, Chung portrays the special relationship she formed with her grandmother from having lived with her in Taiwan as a child. While they were close, bonding over competitive billiards and period dramas, Chung knew little of her grandmother's history as a refugee. After her grandmother passed away in 2013, Chung decided to record details about her life with the help of her mother and other relatives, for the purpose of sharing them with her children. But realizing that there were simply too many unknowns, she ended up embarking on the much larger...