Grace in China: An American Woman Beyond the Great Wall, 1934-1974

Grace Divine of Chattanooga was in New York on a music scholarship in the late 1920s when she met Liu Fu-Chi, a young Chinese man who had come to America to study hydraulic engineering. Across racial and cultural taboos, the two fell in love, married, and had a child. When the Depression gripped the country, Fu-Chi lost his job and returned to China, sending for his wife and baby after he was settled. Thus began Grace Liu's remarkable forty-year residence in a part of the world scarcely seen by Westerners. She was witness to flood and familiar during the 1930s, the brutal Japanese occupation, the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists in the late 1940s, and the ascendancy of Mao followed by the Cultural Revolution in the 1950s and 1960s. Her beloved Fu-Chi fell ill and died in 1955, leaving her to raise their three children. Grace began teaching English at a university and was heralded as an outstanding worker of the people. But at the height of the backlash against education and Western ideas, the Red Guards came for her, denouncing her in a humiliating public spectacle and stripping her of all she had achieved.  In 1974, Grace finally returned to the United States, where she died in 1979. Throughout her life in China, she wrote detailed, well-observed letters to family members, occasional articles for English-language publications, and a journal. Toward the end of her life, she began writing her memoirs with the assistance of a cousin and her son. After her death, the coauthors assembled this book from her letters, articles, and journals. It is one of the most engaging documents to emerge about China in the last half of this century.