GRACE

The extraordinary life of a courageous, outspoken American woman who survived 40 years of upheaval in 20th-century China.

In 1928, the Tennessee-born Grace Divine (1901–79) moved to New York to study for a career in opera. There she met and married Liu Fu-Chi, a wedding that made headlines in her hometown, where mixed-race unions were illegal. Fu-chi returned to his native China in 1932; Grace, now pregnant, planned to follow after their baby was born. It was nearly two years before she set off with her toddler daughter to join her husband in Tianjin, where she lived for the next 40 years, bearing two more children. Grace's son and her cousin tell her remarkable story by quoting at length from letters, articles, and a memoir she wrote. The narrative encompasses the Japanese invasion of China, WWII, horrendous postwar inflation, the communist revolution, her husband's death, Chairman Mao's short-lived Hundred Flowers movement, a radical mastectomy, and the Cultural Revolution, during which she was denounced as a “counter-revolutionary American spy,” jailed, and interrogated. Grace was eventually allowed to return to her job training teachers of college English; after she died in 1979, her Chinese colleagues held a moving memorial service. A partial memoir and, most especially her letters, offer vivid accounts of a roller-coaster life and the transformation of a well-off bourgeoisie with a cook and amahs into a loyal communist living in one room with a coal stove. Grace recounts the corruption and cruelty of the Kuomintang regime and the early successes of the new communist government. She also includes her lengthy self-criticism in front of her colleagues at the university (required during Mao's Great Leap Forward). Through it all, however, Grace never regretted her decision to remain in China—originally for her husband, then for her children, and finally for the happiness that life there brought to her.

A unique perspective on a period of critical transformations in China. (b&w photos)