The young field medic Daming is based on the wartime experiences of a dear friend of the family, Chi-Han Chou, our uncle Chou. Like Daming, Uncle Chou was not a very good student and thought that going to war would be an adventure. So he and a classmate dropped out and made their way to the front lines to look for the classmate’s uncle, a general. The two young men were only about nineteen at the time, with no real skills, but they could read. So they were given medical manuals and pressed into service. Unlike Daming, Uncle Chou survived the war. He married my mother’s dearest friend, moved to Taiwan, then Seattle, and lived a long and blessed life.

The story of Duckling is heart-wrenching and sadly true. A friend of the family, James Oliver Bennington, served during World War II as a water tender second class in the US Navy. On one trip, they transported a troop of Chinese soldiers. One of the soldiers brought his daughter with him. She was “the most be-yoo-tiful little girl,” James recalled. The Americans spoiled the child terribly while she was on board, but in the end there was nothing they could do but watch the young soldier march off to war, his daughter riding on his shoulders. I wrote a better fate for Duckling.

For the chapters set in Shanghai, I drew upon my mother’s stories. She was fifteen and at boarding school in Nanking when war broke out. Her father (the real Dr. Mao) rushed there to bring her home. The family of nine (my grandparents, my grandfather’s concubine, four children, his intern, and a maidservant) traveled by riverboat from their hometown of Pinghu to Shanghai’s International Settlement. They were luckier than most because as a doctor, my grandfather could support them. For the next eight years they lived in a two-room flat. My grandfather used the front room as his clinic and at night the family spread out over the two rooms to sleep. My mother slept on the examining table.

My grandfather had developed a cure for opium addiction, and a bank manager in Shanghai heard about this and sought him out. After my grandfather cured him, the manager began referring all his wealthy friends to my grandfather, whose practice thrived until the war ended and the family could return to their hometown of Pinghu.

As for my father, he was twenty-eight years old before he saw his family and his hometown again.

Read On

An Excerpt from Dragon Springs Road by Janie Chang

CHAPTER 1

November 1908, Year of the Monkey

The morning my mother went away, she burned incense in front of the Fox altar.

The emperor Guangxu and the dowager empress had both died that week. My mother told me our new emperor was a little boy of almost three called Puyi. A child less than half my age now ruled China and she was praying for him. And for us.