The Love of Lotus

Readers will enjoy this memoir about conflicting Chinese and American values in the life of a plucky woman who was born in Hong Kong in 1929. She recalls memorizing Confucian works in her classical primary education, describes surviving front-line WWII in missionary high schools, and recounts the problems of achieving higher education in the U.S., where cultural shocks were mutual. Her late marriage to a Caucasian, delayed by cultural conflicts, is a love story with striking events.

The most engaged readers will be those who want to understand the cultural basis of the generation gap between Chinese parents and Chinese-American children. This memoir, however, is also a thrilling and candid account of a traditional upbringing in Hong Kong of the 1930s, of wartime missionary education in Southern China during WWII, of immigration obstacles, of depression and of cross-cultural marriage. Historians, WWII buffs, psychologists and love story enthusiasts will snap up this book.