I started the research, with my husband Jack, on the book, RETURN TO THE MIDDLE KINGDOM: One Family, Three Revolutionaries, and the Birth of Modern China, during the Cultural Revolution. Despite its attractive name, the Cultural Revolution was a violent purge, launched by Mao Zedong and lasted from 1966 to 1976. One of the things Mao was determined to do was to destroy history. The Red Guards, Mao’s hit men, burned many books and documents, so as to clear the way for Mao to promote his version of events. Both Jack and I treasured our family heritage and we decided to save as much as we could of what we knew about China’s struggle for independence during the last century and a half.

Throughout the Cultural Revolution, we did our research clandestinely. I was the one who scouted around to collect information, sometimes from Red Guards’ wall posters, sometimes put my ear on the grapevine, sometimes rummaged in the garbage dump, salvaging the half-burned and half-torn books and magazines whose owners were too afraid to keep. At night we often read and discussed under the blanket with a torch light. When we wanted to take notes of our reading, we hid ourselves in the space between the legs of a large desk, with a dark green tablecloth hanging around the desk so that the tiny desk light we used while writing would not be seen by busybodies.

But our research was limited because of the lack of resources. For example, Jack’s father, Eugene Chen who was known in China as Chen Youren, was a closest aide to Sun Yatsen, the Chinese version of George Washington. One of Eugene’s accomplishments was the crafting of the “Russia-oriented” policy after Sun’s proposal of unifying China had been repeatedly rejected by the Western Powers. Both Sun and Eugene felt apprehension about this policy, because the colonial Western Powers and imperial Japan, who dominated China, and the backbone of Sun Yatsen’s Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) - middle class and landed gentry, all viewed Marxism as anathema. Any approach to Soviet Russia had to be conducted in strict secrecy. The story had never been told before, and we wanted to tell it with the backup of recorded documents. These we were not able to find in China during 1960s.

In 1971, Jack had a very successful lecture tour in the US, speaking for strengthening the understanding and friendship of the two countries. In 1972, our son Jay and I followed him to live and work in our new adopted country. I taught Chinese language at Cornell, and then worked in the East Asian Library on UC Berkeley campus. Jack and I continued our research, using public and private libraries, thus getting the opportunity to read what had been forbidden in China.

Then in late 1990s, I went to Hong Kong in quest of more research material, and discovered the so called “Lost and Found” history. A number of historians, who had had easy access to the Party’s archives, were allowed to write and publish in Hong Kong after the gradual liberalization of the Party’s intellectual policy. Their books and articles were of great help to my research.

Playing detective, I found shreds of evidence scattered here and there, and by piecing them together, I was able to highlight Eugene’s role in the “Russia-oriented” policy. Eugene was the key, the historical hinge that led to the alliance of the Kuomintang and Communist Party in the early 20s. This policy brought Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other eminent communists into the Kuomintang and let them double up as Kuomintang members; it also put what traditionally had been described as rabble - laborers and peasants - on the political map and released a force unseen before in China.

And there was another example to elucidate how we overcame another hurdle. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards kept Jack under surveillance and imposed restrictions on his movement. His main connection with the outside world was me. I had to go around doing all the things he was not able to do, and I stumbled into people from all walks of life, from high-ranking officials to my neighbors from the lower depths, in a slum house we had been thrown into, and then to poor peasants in a back country village, Upper Felicity, where we had been exiled to. They were all unforgettable characters, with distinct personalities. Through the encounters with them, a colorful panorama of society and intriguing human drama unfolded. Down the road, I gathered information here and there, from this one and that one.

In 1970, Zhou Enlai, the prime minister with whom Jack had thrown in his lot, intervened. He demanded that the Red Guards bring Jack back to Beijing. Our fortune was reversed again. On Zhou’s order, the exit visas were granted to us. On our way to Hong Kong, we were put up in a luxurious suite in Canton and we were told that Prince Sihanouk had stayed in the same suite with Princess Monique. We were back in style, of course, by the standard of China at that time.

Following Jack’s successful lecture tour in the US, we moved from Hong Kong to New York in 1972. I was surprised to find the unanimous view among scholars and historians that Zhou Enlai was a yes man to Mao Zedong. Through Jack’s and my experiences, and from the information I had collected, Zhou Enlai was at once Mao’s partner and opponent. Mao’s first violent purge – the Futian Incident – was launched in 1931. His three prime targets were Zhou Enlai and Zhou’s life-long allies, Zhu De, father of the Red Army, and Chen Yi, the future foreign minister.

I want my book to shed new light on the consistent and long struggle between the Party moderates led by Zhou Enlai and the hardliners led by Mao Zedong, because it is not possible to understand fully how the China of today came about without understanding, in depth, the complex relations between the two men. But I knew that I would not be able to convince readers without the support of recorded documents.

Again I found most of them in the “Lost and Found” history books and articles published in Hong Kong, whose writers evidently had had easy access to the Party and governmental archives. With these documents and the very unique, personal experiences of Jack’s as well as mine, this story of the infighting between Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai challenges the conventional wisdom in Chinese Studies.