My mother had died, but still I heard her voice…

Growing up in an affluent neighbourhood in 1930s Shanghai, Loo Shu-hsin is told that it is ‘no good for a girl to be smart’ – and yet when rumours of the revolution reach their enclave, she is the one sent abroad for an education. In New York, she meets Chao-Pei, a Chinese engineering student, and they set out to make a life together. By the time their daughter – Gish Jen – is born, her parents have only sporadic contact with their families, who are locked in repressive Maoist China. And in her struggle to discipline her American daughter, Loo Shu-hsin finds herself repeating the punishing refrains – ‘Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!’ – that punctured her own childhood.