My name is Yuan-tsung Chen which, in Chinese, means the First Pearl of the Chen family. By the way, Chen is my maiden name too. My family and the family of Jack, my late husband, share a very common Chinese surname. I was born in Shanghai, the greatest metropolis of China, ranked with London, New York, and Amsterdam. My middle class family lived on the fringe of a very special district of the city, the “Foreign Devil’s Vanity Fair” (Shi Li Yang Chang), a satirical label for the French Concession combined with the British- and American-dominated International Settlement. I was educated mainly in American missionary schools. I worked most of the time in Beijing’s Film Publishing House as an editor and translator before coming to USA in 1972.

I dreamed of becoming a writer and writing something which could make a difference ever since I was thirteen years old. This was not only my wish to express myself, to communicate with others, to use the abilities I felt were in me, but also fulfilling the traditional Chinese sense of social responsibility of a writer that one should express the truth as one sees it and understands it.

China was a very poor country. Few people could get an education, and even fewer could get as good an education as I did. Noblesse oblige demanded that an educated person use his knowledge to serve the people. The highest achievement of an educated person was to know the joys and sorrows, and voice the needs and aspirations of the less fortunate, to articulate their feelings and thoughts.

This was the main reason I stayed on in the mainland China when the communists came to power. Did I know I was the kind of bourgeois girl that Mao Zedong was determined to remold? Yes, I did. One way to achieve this was to send people like me to the countryside. Living and working in poverty-stricken rural areas was supposed to have the effect Mao desired on my bourgeois soul: after the crucible, a brand new proletarian was born. The crucible theory did not scare me. I was confident that I could pull myself through Mao’s crucible. Why so confident? I was, by nature, adventurous and curious.

Adventures! Did I get more than I had bargained for? Sure, but I mustn’t jump ahead of the story I am going to tell you. It comprises not only my adventures, but also those of the three generations of men in the Chen family on Jack’s side.

Although I suffered a great deal in Mao Zedong’s  violent purges, I knew that I could not have written my two books without suffering. My first book, THE DRAGON’S VILLAGE, deals with the land reform which earned many favorable reviews for the characterization of the poor, illiterate, voiceless peasants. Its paperback by Penguin is still in printing, and selling steadily 3000 copies each year since 1981.

I wrote this new book, RETURN TO THE MIDDLE KINGDOM, in the same spirit. The three Chen men had been gone and therefore voiceless, and it was my family obligation to tell their stories, and it was also my duty of a survivor to tell the stories of the less fortunate who had perished in the numerous political and social upheavals.