Born in the Year of the Tiger, Hu Nu, unwanted female child, is nearly given away as a one-year-old bride in a Chinese village. She grows up during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, when traditional values are challenged by the politicized young, and nonconformity is repressed with brutal humiliation, examples of which she witnesses daily in her neighbourhood and in her school. Hu Nu joins the Red Guard movement more out of fear than conviction, later to reject it bitterly for its senseless cruelty. Using first-person and third-person narratives, Lien Chao captures thirty-five years of recent Chinese history through the gripping stories of Hu Nü and her generation as they survive both political repression in Mao's China and outdated attitudes to women.

Lien Chao's profile page

Lien Chao is the author of Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English (1997), winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism. Her other publications include Tiger Girl: Hu Nü (2001), a creative memoir about growing up in Mao's China; Strike the Wok: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Canadian Fiction (2003), edited with Jim Wong-Chu; The Chinese Knot and Other Stories (2008); and three collections of bilingual poetry, Maples and the Stream (1999), More Than Skin Deep (2004), and Salt in My Life (2019). She has also published several bilingual books on Chinese Brush Painting. She is an inter-arts artist.