The Crippled Tree
The Crippled Tree is a history and biography by Han Suyin. It covers the years 1885 to 1928, beginning with the life of her father, a Belgium-educated Chinese engineer of Hakka heritage, from a family of minor gentry in Sichuan. It describes how he met and married her mother, a Flemish Belgian, his return to China and her own birth and early life. (She was born in 1917). She goes on to describe how her family's ancestors had fled from the Mongol invasion of North China, and became gentry in Sichuan, the 'land of the  four rivers'. How they were involved in putting down a revolt by the Hui people, Chinese Muslims who rebelled in sympathy with the great Taiping Rebellion of the mid-19th century. She follows her father's life as he goes to Shanghai and then to Belgium to be trained as an engineer. How he "became enchanted with Western Science" She also tells how her mother, from a well-connected Belgian family, fell in love with her father and chose to follow him back to China, even giving up her Belgian nationality. Also the lower status that it gave her mother in  early 20th century China As her father tells it: She then tells of her own early years, growing up in a China divided between rival warlords. Of the coming to power of Chiang Kai-shek in 1926, and the moving of the capital from Beijing to Nanjing - the book uses the older English transliterations that were then standard, Peking and Nanking. At the time, the Chinese Communists seemed finished, and their guerrilla armies unimportant. As one of her uncles put it: The story gets as far as 1928 and is continued in A Mortal Flower. It gives an interesting insider  view from someone who was familiar with both China and Europe. It is definitely partisan - though never a Communist, Han Suyin largely took her world-view from Zhou Enlai, as she describes in her later books. But it also gives you a view you'd not find anywhere else.