Trailblazing women: a grandmother and great-aunt

Reading Sasha Su-Ling Welland's book about her remarkable forbears is like unearthing a long-hidden treasure.

In "A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters" (Rowman & Littlefield, 368 pp., $24.95), Welland writes linked accounts of her grandmother, Amy Ling, who became a medical doctor, settling in the American Midwest, and her grandmother's sister, Ling Shuhua, a writer of renown who consorted with England's Bloomsbury set.

The author, a lecturer at the University of Washington, interviewed her grandmother extensively, and pieced together the life of her great aunt (whom she never met) through a trove of collected writings and the works of others.

At the turn of the 20th century, China was emerging from centuries of dynastic rule amid considerable political turmoil. European colonialism was followed by the terror of Japanese invasion and subjugation, and the rise of the Nationalist and Communist movements. The two sisters grew up in a society still cleaving to traditional practices such as foot binding and concubinage. Yet educational opportunities for girls were opening up in China, and their father, a high-level official in the Nationalist government, encouraged his daughters' aspirations.

In 1921, both sisters enrolled in the newly formed Yanjing University in Beijing, pursuing different academic disciplines. Their peers were the "modern girls" of the day, who rejected arranged marriages and Confucian values as they dressed in short skirts, went to the cinema and worked for a living.

Shuhua became one of the leading women writers of her era, publishing three collections of short stories about the lives of modern Chinese women. She joined a group of intellectuals and artists who often hosted important visitors to China, among them Bertrand Russell, Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and Bloomsbury's bonnie prince, Julian Bell. At the urging of Bell and his aunt Virginia Woolf, Shuhua wrote her autobiography in English. Published in 1953 by Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press, "Ancient Melodies" was one of the prime motivations for Welland to explore her past and write this book.

No one had a greater effect on Shuhua's personal life than Bell. During his extended stay in Beijing in the mid-1930s, he and Shuhua, by then married to a Chinese writer, carried on a torrid affair. Bell related the sordid details to his mother and aunt in a raft of blabby letters. Welland devotes an entire chapter to this sensational romance, and the weight she gives it — because of the mother lode of source material — threatens to unravel her finely woven coverage of the sisters' stories, but she recovers nicely in later chapters.

Author appearance

Sasha Su-Ling Welland reads from "A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters," 7:30 tonight, presented by Hedgebrook and Elliott Bay Book Co. at Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle; free (206-624-6600 or www.elliottbaybook.com).

Sister Amy forged an equally impressive and independent path, attending Peking Union Medical College. One of five Chinese women to win a prestigious scholarship to study abroad, she came to America in 1925 to study medicine at Western Reserve University in Cleveland (now Case Western Reserve University), and she later helped her husband in his drug research. Amy was assertive and thoroughly modern herself. In one heroic act as a schoolgirl, she persuaded two sisters to unbind their feet in time for her school's sports exhibition.

I appreciate what this book is not: a gauzy family memoir filled with first-person blather. Welland wisely refrains from intruding on the narration, allowing her fascinating topic to speak for itself. Scholarly and "serious" in its depth and breadth of research, Welland's book is also highly readable and full of rich detail. She more than rises to the challenge of reconciling her subjects' conflicting (and vexing) recollections of the past, and she doesn't shy away from criticism. She admits, for instance, that a "wholly redemptive narrative [is] impossible" given her grandmother's adoption of racist attitudes toward non-whites.

This is a book that enlightens as much as it delights and remains with you long after the reading.