Real-Life Inspirations for Daughters of Shandong

Real-Life Inspirations for Daughters of Shandong

This article relates to Daughters of Shandong

Eve J. Chung's debut novel Daughters of Shandong focuses on the mother and daughters of a landowning family who flee China for Taiwan as a result of the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Chung has spoken about how she was motivated to write the book by her maternal grandmother's experiences of that period of history.

However, what became a work of fiction started as a simple attempt to record her family's past. In a note to readers, Chung portrays the special relationship she formed with her grandmother from having lived with her in Taiwan as a child. While they were close, bonding over competitive billiards and period dramas, Chung knew little of her grandmother's history as a refugee. After her grandmother passed away in 2013, Chung decided to record details about her life with the help of her mother and other relatives, for the purpose of sharing them with her children. But realizing that there were simply too many unknowns, she ended up embarking on the much larger project of fictionalizing her grandmother's story.

In an interview with Sampan, Chung talks about how another thread that informed her writing of Daughters of Shandong was her work as a human rights lawyer, which has focused on gender equality. Writing about a fictional Chinese family in the 1940s and '50s gave her the opportunity to address the sexism and misogyny inherent in society at that time. The poor treatment of women and girls, who are often shown to be given less importance and value than their male counterparts, is a major theme of the novel.

"I hope it helps draw attention to the entrenched sexism that women face in many cultures around the world," she says. Mentioning that she has seen both changes and continued "challenges" in her generation regarding sexism in Chinese culture, Chung also stresses that her interest in gender equality is not specific to any one group of people but extends across time and place, and also alludes to the unique difficulties and issues that women refugees face: "All over the world, there is backlash against women's rights, which is chipping away at hard-earned progress for gender equality—this is true as well in the country that I live in, the United States...What saddens me most is that there are still many women and girls who are refugees and/or suffer as a result of armed conflict, just like my grandmother and her family."

In a recent article for Writer's Digest, Chung writes about choosing the cover art for her novel, which ended up being a painting by Wang Yidong, an artist from her grandmother's home province of Shandong. In conjunction with this, she comments on the inspiration behind the novel's title, explaining that while her grandmother's remains are buried in Taipei, her roots were an important part of her identity: "Among Chinese people, it is common to ask a person where their lao jia, their 'old home' is—the roots of their origin, which is not where they were born, but where their family is from."

Filed under Books and Authors

This "beyond the book article" relates to Daughters of Shandong. It originally ran in May 2024 and has been updated for the May 2024 edition. Go to magazine.

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