Revolution

My grandfather, known to me as ‘ye-ye’, was born into a large well-to-do merchant class family in the early 1930’s during a troubled time in China. A decade after the dissolution of dynastic imperialism that lasted over 2000 years, China in the 1920’s was fighting to find its identity among a massive cultural shift, warlordism, and civil war in an increasingly global world.

Tensions were brewing while my ye-ye grew up in what he describes as an idyllic childhood despite unsettling clues of a quietly turbulent and changing time. …