Eleanor McCallie Cooper

"May you live in interesting times" certainly applies to the life of Grace Devine Liu. Born in Tennessee, Grace marries Mr. Liu (a Chinese citizen) in 1932. They move to Tientsin (Tianjin), China where she lives an easy life raising children in the Foreign Concession until the Japanese invasion, WWII, civil war, communism and the Cultural Revolution turn her world upside down. Very few Americans chose to stay in China during these difficult times. It was a choice Grace made for herself and her children that certainly had it's price. Grace's story is amazingly reconstructed from letters, diaries, conversations and family memories into a graphic description of what life inside China was like during these interesting times. It reads like a novel, but as is so often true, it is better than fiction.… (mais)