Publisher Description

Marking the debut of a stunning new literary talent, Lisa Huang Fleischman's extraordinary saga -- inspired by her grandmother's life as an early feminist, political activist, and friend of Mao Zedong -- is a masterpiece about one clever and resourceful woman, growing up amidst the turmoil of twentieth-century China.
Dream of the Walled City
Born in 1890, the privileged and sheltered daughter of a high-ranking imperial official, Jade Virtue spends her childhood enclosed by the towering walls of her family's sprawling mansion, never glimpsing the desperate struggle of China's ancient society, as the old ways are challenged and the twentieth century?fast, fearsome, and tumultuous?rushes in. But when her father mysteriously dies, young Jade Virtue is suddenly thrust into poverty, and experiences firsthand a traditional culture falling apart under the onslaught of growing rebellion against the Emperor, rapid social changes, and the mounting aggression of Japan and the West.
Fleischman has rendered a richly textured, panoramic vision of Chinese life in the perilous years between the end of the empire and the Communist triumph of 1949, charting Jade Virtue's arranged first marriage to the corrupt opium addict Wang Mang, who harbors a terrible secret in his family's past; her awakening independence and ambivalent politics; her struggles with motherhood; and her fascinating acquaintance with a gifted, idealistic, fiercely ambitious young man named Mao Zedong. But the most important choices of her life are shaped by her conflicting loyalties to her intense lifelong friendship with Jinyu, a fiery woman revolutionary, and to Guai, a government official and sworn enemy of the Communists, with whom she finally discovers true and redemptive love.
Exquisitely nuanced and lyrical yet marked with a driving power, Dream Of The Walled City is an enthralling novel of hard-won personal independence set against the vivid backdrop of a rapidly changing world. From the final days of the last dynasty through the savage Japanese invasion during World War II to the formidable red dawn of the Communist triumph; from the backward rural province of Hunan to exile on the tropical shores of Taiwan; and from the binding chains of predetermined fate to the exhilarating liberation of a human spirit, this is a remarkable odyssey you will never forget.

Author Biography

Lisa Huang Fleischman was born in Taipei, Taiwan, to a Chinese mother and an American father, and speaks Mandarin Chinese. She spent her early childhood in Asia and Africa, until her family moved to the United States. In 1989, during a visit to China, she took part in the Tiananmen Square student protests. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia Law School, and is now a federal prosecutor in New York.

Review

Booklist This novel gives a very real sense of China's complicated and tumultuous history during the first half of the twentieth century.
Library Journal Compelling, full of action and emotion....
Publishers Weekly Earnest and emotionally astute....A sweeping historical novel.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Imagine that you could experience one of the twentieth century's most compelling human dramas -- the revolution of China from decaying empire to the centralized control of Mao Tse-Tung's Communist party from your own home. Lisa Huang Fleischman offers this story in a nicely written, subtly detailed account....This first-time writer has produced a well-told tale...she has a fine eye....A painstaking and compelling storyteller, with flashes of insight.
The New Yorker The historical backdrop recalls Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, but Fleischman also possesses a delicate restraint, attending to the rhythms of everyday Chinese life even as the ancient traditions are snuffed out, one by one.
The Oakland Press It is difficult to believe Dream Of The Walled City is Fleischman's first novel; so vivid are the characters, so inspiring is the tale. She takes the reader on an unforgettable journey of survival and at the same time offers an important history lesson -- both in an engrossing page-turner that is nearly impossible to abandon even for a moment.
Winston-Salem Journal (NC) A work of evocative beauty....Fleischman portrays characters, relationships, and actions with an illuminating sensitivity. She understands not just human nature, but also the human heart. Consequently, one learns more about history from such a work than from a book of facts and figures.
Andrew X. Pham, author of Catfish and Mandala Dream Of The Walled City is a lovingly crafted work of historical fiction inspired by the life of the author's grandmother. Fleischman has successfully depicted a fascinating Chinese woman who is trapped but not defeated by the parameters of her life in a tumultuous society.
Bret Lott, author of Jewel What is most remarkable about Lisa Huang Fleischman's Dream Of The Walled City Is that even in the midst of a saga of such breathtaking scope, she has succeeded in keeping this an intimate tale. We care about Jade Virtue, and care about her life and love and ambitions and sorrows.
Phoebe Eng, author of Warrior Lessons: An Asian American Woman's Journey into Power Exhilarating and powerful....Lisa Huang Fleischman has given us the story of smart, bold women at a pivotal point in China's history. Finally, we get to see through a woman's eyes the heart of a revolution.

Review Quote

Winston-Salem Journal(NC)A work of evocative beauty....Fleischman portrays characters, relationships, and actions with an illuminating sensitivity. She understands not just human nature, but also the human heart. Consequently, one learns more about history from such a work than from a book of facts and figures.

Excerpt from Book

Chapter One This person speaking is Jade Virtue, and Old Liang, the late chief magistrate of the city, was my father. He was important in life, and may still be so, out there among the dead. In the empire of China, in the red-earth province of Hunan, in the ancient walled city of Changsha, his mansion stood as one of the finest of the great houses. The manor flaunted its shiny green-tiled roofs, its carefully tended wisteria vines, like a proud woman in fine clothes. The outer walls were painted a fresh bright red every new year. Sunlight reflected from a hundred glass windows, while the windows in the other houses of the city were made of oiled paper. The great red-painted front gates were studded with brass, polished every day to shine like the gold rings on the fingers of my mother and of my father''s concubines. A hundred servants scurried through the dozen courtyards, cooking live shrimp in boiling rice whiskey, pouring fine wine, steaming the crinkles out of silk garments, planting flowers, all for the pleasure of Old Liang and his women and children. I was born in the year 4588, or 1890 by Western counting. The first ten years of my childhood were passed entirely within the walls of that house. I knew the great rooms, whose floors were wiped every day with soft cloths by the maids on their hands and knees, and the crowded servants'' courtyards, where they would boil tea and spit into the gutters. Rich and poor, fat and thin, old and young -- all lived under our roof, walking to and fro as men do on the face of the earth. But I knew, too, those parts of the house that were like the depths of the sea, or the caves in the mountains. I knew the four blue tiles in the corner of the bathhouse floor whose cracks, traced by my small finger, formed a perfect spider''s web. I played with the dusty old birdcages lined up in a row on a windowsill in the grain storage room. I watched the slow tide of tarnish spread from one corner of the copper mirror that hung forgotten in an unused room, watched as over the years it seeped across the surface of the metal and slowly blinded it. And I knew the alley between the kitchen courtyard and the banquet hall, which was always damp and muddy, even on the hottest day. When it rained, a pool of water would form, resting lightly on the dark red mud, the footprints of the servants protruding from under the edges of the reflected silver sky and early moon and black tree branches, an entire planet drawn upside down into the heel mark of a serving girl. We had frequent guests, visiting officials and imperial soldiers with messages, all of whom were lavishly entertained by my father with banquets and gifts; but unlike those of us who lived there, they entered our walls and left again when their business was finished, and being temporary, they seemed somehow not quite real. Of our entire household, only my father ever went outside the walls regularly, to preside over the criminal court or to attend council meetings at the governor''s palace. My mother and the concubines rarely ventured out. Guei Xiang, the First Concubine, passed for a scholar among women, and would sometimes read us stories when she became bored. Xiao Zhuang, the Second Concubine, must have been very young herself, for she liked best to play dolls with us, and even cut up her own silk scarves to make doll clothes. I don''t know how they occupied themselves otherwise, since only my mother, the Big Wife, ran the household. She held all the money, and ordered all the food, and when the concubines gave the servants any but the most insignificant kind of orders, the servants would always ask my mother first if they might obey. Guei Xiang and Xiao Zhuang were always very excited on the few occasions when they left the house to go outside, either to accompany my mother on a formal visit or, following a few steps behind my father and mother on feast days, when they went to venerate my father''s ancestors. Sometimes my father would take Guei Xiang to a poetry-writing party, and then she made a great production out of leaving, clutching her inkstone and brushes importantly. As far as I was concerned, they simply mysteriously disappeared and then reappeared. I could not understand why they were so eager to go outside, since going outside the walls was like dropping out of the world. But the very beginning of this new Western century, the Western year 1900, was marked by many strange portents. The Boxers, the heaven-sent rebels, with their black headbands and clenched fists, killed many in the great cities of the north, and were killed in their turn by the foreign armies that marched into Beijing and Shanghai. Stars fell; distant waters flooded their banks and spread out over the defenseless fields. In Changsha, frogs clambered out of the Xiang River by the thousands, to be eaten by peasants and degree candidates, who are always hungry. Strange flocks of black birds roosted in the trees. And that summer, my father fell mysteriously ill and lay in his bedchamber, sweating through many layers of silken bedding. In our family at that point in time there were only three children remaining. My elder brother Li Shi, aged thirteen. Myself, personal name Jade Virtue, aged ten years. And my younger sister Graceful Virtue, aged seven. All of us, as far as we knew, the children of our mother. Before and behind and between us had come eleven other children that my father had sired, but the spirits of infants were more fickle in those days, and fled this earth easily, and all of them now lay under the rough red earth along the eastern wall of the city cemetery. For fear that our spirits might be just as unreliable, we children were kept strictly away from our sick father, and after a while his illness ceased to fascinate us and became merely a part of our life in the house. Li Shi continued to take lessons every morning with his tutors, preparing for the day when he would sit for the imperial examinations, and Graceful Virtue and I simply played together, or with the servants'' children. But my mother and the concubines took turns nursing my father, one of them always present in his bedroom. Guei Xiang was there most often, because she answered all his letters for him as she always did, kneeling on the floor by his bed to take dictation, brushing the characters very quickly onto the rice paper spread out in front of her. Indeed, my father often joked that there were several officials in the capital who thought Guei Xiang''s excellent calligraphy was his own. Sometimes if my father awoke and found my mother or Xiao Zhuang there, he would send them to fetch Guei Xiang, because she was the only one who could read to him. Then Xiao Zhuang would weep quietly outside his door, whispering to my mother that the Old Master did not care for her. My mother listened to her, nodding, but the serene expression she always wore on her face did not change. That year, autumn came early and harshly to Hunan. It grew unusually cold, and then it seemed to me as if my father became worse. There were no more letters sent out, or reading aloud; my mother began sitting up all night at his bedside. Curtains were draped over the lattices of the doors and windows, and we could no longer see inside to where he lay. A long column of doctors, including the governor''s own physician, came to my father''s bedroom. The door would open slightly to admit them and shut behind them again immediately. They always left with serious faces, plucking at their long sagacious gray beards with their pale fingers, the skirts of their dark silk gowns rustling amongst the brown leaves lying on the stones of the courtyard. f0 Ever since my feet were bound the year before, the pain sometimes woke me in the middle of the night. Usually, I simply lay quietly so as not to disturb Graceful Virtue, who had a tendency to get sick when she hadn''t slept. I would gnaw my fingers, or rub my temples, or count my breaths until light showed at the window. But one night, as the knife edge of winter began to show, with windless chill and frost on the roof tiles, I could not keep still, and finally got up and wincingly pulled my shoes on over my foot bindings. Cold air sometimes relieved the excruciating throb in my ankles, so I wrapped myself in my quilted coat and opened the door of the room and looked out into the central courtyard. Across the open space, under the unmoving bare branches of the ginkgo trees, I could see the dull glow of the lamps from my father''s bedroom. I could see my mother''s shadow inside, moving against the white curtains. I thought about the shadow puppets in a play that a traveling puppeteer had put on for the entire household last summer, waving his little paper figures behind a white screen lit from behind by lanterns, while my father and his women laughed and clapped along with the servants. But there was something about my mother''s shadow just then that disturbed me -- there was an awkward, frantic quality that was alien to her usually graceful, restrained manner. If I hadn''t clearly recognized my mother''s profile, I would have thought that some strange woman was in my father''s room. Then I saw her shadow drop a bowl, and I heard it crack into pieces on the stone floor, and watched as she put her hands to her head in despair, and heard her low groan float across to me on the night air. The sound of the crash drew me across the icy courtyard toward the light behind the curtains. I found the door ajar and slipped inside, shutting it behind me. All the lamps were burning, and I blinked a moment in the sudden glare. My father''s bed was at the far end of the room, and the curtains were mostly drawn -- I could see only his bare forearm lying on the mattress. My mother had her back to me, crouching on the floor and picking up the pieces of

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