As a first-generation Chinese-American dutifully majoring in Chinese studies, Pang-Mei Natasha Chang stumbled across the name of her great-aunt Chang Yu-i in a history book. To Pang-Mei's astonishment, her eighty-three-year-old aunt, best known in the family for her retiring ways and masculine manner, had once been married to Hsu Chih-mo, China's preeminent modern poet, had run the Shanghai Women's Savings Bank during the 1930s, and had suffered the anguish of enduring what is considered China's first Western-style divorce. Could this same woman, whom Pang-Mei regarded as part respected elder and part unsophisticated immigrant, be the same romantic heroine from her textbooks? Over the next few years, Pang-Mei spent long afternoons with Yu-i drawing forth her story - an unforgettable saga of a woman, born in Shanghai at the turn of the century to a highly respected, well-to-do family, who continually defied the expectations of her class and culture.
"In China, a woman is nothing," began Yu-i over tea and dumplings. "This is the first lesson I want to give so that you will understand." Growing up in the perilous years between the fall of the last Emperor and the Communist Revolution, Yu-i led a life marked by a series of rebellions that changed the course of her life, including the first and most lasting: her refusal to have her feet bound. And through Yu-i's stories, Pang-Mei comes to understand something of her own ambivalences regarding her Chinese heritage and the ever-present tug between familial duty and individual desire.
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