Daughter of the River
Born during the Great Famine of the early 1960's, Hong Ying, or Little Six as she was known, grew up in a slum on the hilly Yangtze bank, a neighbourhood permanently veiled in fog and steeped in superstition. Life was precarious and, Hong Ying, the youngest of six children, grew up afraid that she would be condemned to a life of carrying sand and emptying chamber pots. At eighteen, she fell in love with her teacher, but he was married, and under enormous political pressure as a result of the catastrophic Cultural Revolution. Gradually Hong Ying began to try and solve some of the mysteries which had seemed to surround her early life- a stalker who had followed her since she was a child, a VD record in her father's file, and a persistent feeling that there was something strange about her birth. Among her discoveries Hong Ying learnt that her mother was once married to a Triadman who had died in a labour camp as a counter-revolutionary, while her father, now a blind sailor, had several times barely escaped with his life during the civil war. Under the rule of the horribly corrupt cadres her mother had had to take extreme measures to keep the children alive while several of her relatives starved to death during the three-year Great Famine. Moreover, Hong Ying's stalker turned out to have an astoundingly close connection with her. After the tragic deaths of both her first lover and her first child, Hong Ying decided she had to take control of her own life- she left home and worked hard to become a published poet and a novelist. After the events in Tian'anmen Square, she left China to live in London.