num_pages: 280
description: On the night of June Fourth a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past fighting what she calls the minds arrow of time.When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya who grew up in America takes her mothers ashes to China Liyas memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China and Yongzong the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist an ambivalent mother and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liyas own sense of displacement.
language: English
title: Little Gods
publisher: Custom House