RETURN TO THE MIDDLE KINGDOM: ONE FAMILY, THREE REVOLUTIONARIES, AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN CHINA, is  published by Union Square Press of Sterling Publishing .

This is an epic story of China’s rebirth as a nation in modern times. As Eugene Chen (my late father-in-law) said in my book, the Chinese people and civilization “had witnessed the rise and fall of empires in the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates…” Where are those empires? But in a sense, the Chinese Empire is still alive and kicking. Few nations have that kind of long continuity. Even fewer can say that their boundaries are hardly less than they have ever been. How come? Well, there is some clue in my book.

Actually my story does not begin with Eugene, but with his father Ah Chen, the first revolutionary of the Chen family. Ah Chen was a landless peasant, and could barely keep himself from dying of hunger, but he dared to dream. In 1850 he joined the Taiping Rebellion; inspired by Christian ideas, he strove with his comrades to establish God’s Kingdom on earth. When the Rebellion was crushed in 1864 by the Manchu Court of Qing Dynasty, Ah Chen refused to hole up in a back country and to be buried alive. He immigrated to Trinidad, then a British colony.

The second revolutionary of the Chen family was Eugene Chen whose Chinese name was Chen Youren, Ah Chen’s eldest son, born in 1878. He finished his education on scholarship and became the first Chinese lawyer in Trinidad. In late 1911, inspired by a speech by Sun Yatsen, the man who led the 1911 Revolution overthrowing the last Manchu Dynasty, Eugene decided to fight for his long-suffering homeland. All he had with him was his remarkable courage, which led him to set off for China, despite not having any knowledge of the maelstrom of Chinese politics that he was about to plunge into.

Thus Eugene embarked on an incredible journey of adventure. He took on warlords, would-be emperor, prime ministers, colonialists. Twice he was imprisoned and twice he escaped from the firing squad. Indeed, Eugene played a leading role, as Sun Yatsen’s closest aid, in preserving the Republic of China. Then he made so bold as to challenge the Allied Powers, led by President Woodrow Wilson, at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Versailles was the Olympus of its time, and the gods were holding court there and deciding the fate of nations. But Eugene stole their thunder and turned their Holy Mount upside down. This was a true-life story of David versus Goliath.

In 1925 Sun Yatsen died of cancer, and in 1926 Eugene’s wife Aisy also died of cancer. It was at this time, Eugene and Soong Chingling, widow of Sun Yatsen, fell in love. That was the year before the United Front of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) and the Communist Party broke up. Eugene’s love affair with Soong Chingling blossomed under an overcast sky with dark clouds rolling fiercely over their head.

In July of 1927, Eugene ignored the tempting overtures of Chiang Kaishek, the man most responsible for the split. He went with Soong Chingling to Russia on a revolution mission, hoping to get Moscow’s agreement to resuscitate the United Front, minus Chiang Kaishek.

In Moscow, Eugene and his children were royally received, banqueting in the Sugar Palace and watching ballet in the former imperial box, while at the same time they were stabbed in the back: Stalin planned to recognize Chiang Kaishek’s government at Nanjing, letting down the left-wing Kuomintang who refused to collaborate with Chiang, and leaving the Chinese Communist Party without support.

It was during Eugene’s last talk with Stalin that he fully realized how the dictator intended to use him and Chingling in a most demeaning manner in order to appease Chiang Kaishek. Outraged, Eugene went into self-exile in Paris. Since he and Soong Chingling could not go back to China together and resume their work there, they were forced to go their separate ways. This was a love story taking place in an enormous revolution, tinged with pain mixed with exaltation of an ancient Greek tragedy.

Now let me turn to the third revolutionary of the Chen family Jack, Eugene’s younger son (and my late husband). After his mother’s death, Jack left London for China to join his father in early February of 1927. The United Front was crumbling, and the right-wing Kuomintang generals began to purge the communists. Jack stumbled into Mao Zedong, then a lanky young man with thick, disheveled hair like an unruly peasant lad, and Zhou Enlai, young, handsome, debonair, with a taste for French literature and the beauty of Parisian women.

The two atheists were on the firing line. Jack, a devout Roman Catholic and out of Christian charity, sheltered them. The three young men became friends, and thus began Jack’s journey of Marxist adventure. In serving the revolution, he roamed through nearly all the major metropolises in this world: London, Shanghai, Peking, Moscow, Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Washington, Berlin and so on. He was my Don Quixote, reaching for the unreachable. When I married him in 1958 and then during the violent purge, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), I became his female Sancho Panza, doing all the errands that he was not able to do because of his lack of knowledge of the Chinese language and his being arrested by the Red Guards, the hit men of the purge.

In 1969, the Red Guards evicted us from our home and threw us into a slum house. My new neighbors included people who were from what could be described as “the lower depths”, such as a former prostitute, a semi-reformed thief, a beggar-turned-janitor, a cleaning woman who doubled as a bed playmate to her employer, an old witch who practiced black magic. Because many of them fell under the category of urban proletariat, they were more trusted by the Red Guards and had easier access to highly confidential documents which the Red Guards, in the confusion of anarchy and lawlessness, had stolen from the Party archives. Thus my new neighbors provided information necessary for our survival.

With their information as well as that from other sources, I helped Jack decide when to do what. I smuggled out Jack’s letters to his American brother-in-law, Jay Leyda, who was arranging a lecture tour for him in the USA. I managed to meet with Zhou Enlai, the prime minister, at a decisive moment that would finally get us off the Red Guards’ death row.

Writing from a special vantage point, as one of the Chen family and also a participant in the narrative I narrate, I am able to illuminate the historical events and fill quite a few gaps in the history of one of the most vital periods of modern China.

By blending the biographies of the three Chen men with history the way I did, I believe I can make the characters and places come alive, and dramatize the facts with details and anecdotes. The book reads like an intriguing history fused with an extraordinary three-generation family saga.

Jack Chen, Yanan base camp, China, 1938