Flowers for Mei-Ling

Chinese by birth, Eurasian by blood, Mei-Ling Wang's extraordinary life is a mirror of our time. Born in China in 1949, the year of the Red Army's entry into Beijing, she is the daughter of an English mother and Chinese father who share the Communist vision of a more perfect future. Mei-ling grows to womanhood amid the violent passions and numbing brutality unleashed by the Cultural Revolution. In 1968, as a tidal wave of political turmoil engulfs the globe, Mei-Ling, penniless, is forced to flee her homeland. She embarks on an odyssey that carries her from China to Hong Kong to Europe to North America. Beautiful and intelligent, compelled by necessity and desire, Mei-Ling threads her way carefully among the men who love her and use her. She discovers the power of sex and the lure of wealth; she mastered the art of survival. When she returns to Hong Kong and China in 1997, the colony and the mainland are about to become one country again. The People's Republic and the daughter who was forced to flee its shores so long before have been tempered by their struggles and stripped of their illusions. They are wealthy and strong. But they have been forced to relinquish the ideals that first brought them into being. Flowers for Mei-Ling is an epic story that propels the reader through fifty years of tumultuous events. With this panoramic first novel, Lorraine Lachs joins that company of ambitious novelists who explore both public affairs and private passions with understanding and conviction.