The legend of the Willow Star is my own invention, a riff on the popular Chinese myth of the Cowherd and the Celestial Weaver Girl. Their love story is celebrated every year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month in a festival that’s been branded as “Chinese Valentine’s Day.”

Chinese constellations do not map to Western star charts. The Purple Forbidden Enclosure where the Willow Star and her sisters live consists of constellations surrounding the North Celestial Pole, or Polaris the Northern Star. The Four Maids-in-Waiting, the stars representing the Willow Star and her sisters, correlate roughly to the constellation Draco.

Minghua 123’s route through China is an amalgam of several journeys described by various survivors of mobile campuses. Some of them took circuitous routes because the Japanese did not roll across China in a single, unbroken wave. A time-lapse map of the invasion would look more like splotches of amoeba-shaped territories, advancing and retreating. There was no one safe route and it was impossible for refugees to predict from one day to the next whether an area was still part of Free China or occupied by the Japanese.

The spelling of place names (Nanking, Peking, Chengtu, etc.) is according to Chinese postal romanization, a form of Wade-Giles romanization that persisted in common use even after it was abolished by the Chinese Communists in 1964.

And finally, readers of Three Souls and Dragon Springs Road may recognize some of the minor characters in this novel.

Acknowledgments

It’s pretty clear to me by now that authors only get through the trauma of writing a book because we are blessed with friends and professional colleagues who tolerate us with great indulgence despite our strange hours and even stranger behavior.

During my initial research on refugee students, The Great Flowing River, a memoir by Bangyuan Qi, was only available in Chinese and German, neither of which I can read. Thank you to Dr. Hui-wen Von Groeling-Che, responsible for the German translation, for answering my questions so generously. Thank you also to my sister-in-law, Alice, whose network of amazing friends put me in touch with Dr. Von Groeling-Che. Big thanks to my friend Dr. Helena Swinkels, who never got annoyed at my questions and even lent me her handbook of infectious tropical diseases.

I’m immensely grateful to some wonderful people who were willing to read the early and ugly versions of the manuscript. To my secret weapon Jennifer Pooley, who has helped on all three of my novels; the beautiful and talented Claire Mulligan; and the incomparable Kate Quinn. Thank you, thank you for your patience and your astute comments, all of which helped shape the book.