A tale of spirits, revolution, ambition, and four generations of strong women. My memoir, Once Our Lives,
explores family history, mysterious prophecies, tragedy,
and the eternal hopefulness of life.
“Once Our Lives” is a multi-generational memoir based on the dramatic true events of two Chinese families over four generations. The book opens in the 1930s with a strange family myth about a boy who is born into a prosperous family but whose life is changed forever when he is entered by the unlucky spirit of a wandering beggar — dooming him, according to one chilling prophecy, to a fate he struggles against his whole life. At the same time, a girl from a remote seaside village is torn from her family and forced into a life of unhappy luxury in cosmopolitan Shanghai, surrounded by round-eyed devils, acts of startling kindness and cruelty, and a newfangled magical device called…radio.
When their paths unexpectedly cross, the result is anything but a typical love story. Swept up with millions of others in the gigantic cultural tides of their time, their “Riches-to-Rags” story takes them from their privileged positions at the pinnacle of society downwards to persecuted political victims in a medieval fortress to a shantytown where life and death hang in the balance every day, and finally to a prison of the State.
Their last hope of redemption lies in the promise of the only treasure not yet taken from them — four “worthless” girls who may escape the fates of their parents and take with them their hopes and dreams. The book ends with the eerie outcome of the prophecy foretold at the outset of the story.
Based on the writer’s personal experience, 50 years of Chinese history, and the true stories of two families over four generations, the book takes the reader on an exotic journey filled with luxurious banquets, hidden jewels, kidnappings, babies sold in opium dens, pirates on the open sea, and desperate flights from death in the desert — seen through the eyes of a man for whom the truth would spell disaster and a lonely, beautiful girl with three identities.
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