When Chen Yuan-tsung married a dashing half-Chinese, half-French Creole journalist in 1958, little did she know that her husband, Jack, belonged to an illustrious family whose members had taken part in three revolutions in modern China.
The truth began to unfold in 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards interrogated Jack Chen - who worked for the government's Foreign Languages Bureau in Beijing - for possessing a large collection of 'decadent' art- history books.
'At the end of the interrogation, the leader of the Red Guards said to Jack: 'You must go back three generations to see what crimes your family has committed against the revolution, and write them down,'' says Chen, 77, a Shanghai native. 'Jack consulted me on what to write and what not to write. The more he told me the more I wondered if we could keep our heads above water.'
Chen's family memoir, Return to the Middle Kingdom: One Family, Three Revolutionaries and the Birth of Modern China, recounts not only the couple's ordeal during those turbulent times but also the three-generation saga of the Chen family.
This extraordinary story began when Chen Guixin, a landless Hakka peasant, fought in the Taiping Rebellion, the 19th-century revolt that precipitated the downfall of the Qing dynasty. After the rebellion was crushed by the imperial army, he escaped arrest by selling himself as an indentured labourer and emigrating to Jamaica. Adopting the Christian name Joseph, he married a fellow migrant and bought land in Trinidad.
His eldest son, Eugene, became a lawyer and married a French Creole beauty from a rich Trinidadian family. The young lawyer took his family to London, but not long after he left them for Beijing, in 1912, drawn by Sun Yat-sen's call urging overseas Chinese to go home and serve the new republic. Eugene, also later known as Chen Youren, quickly earned Sun's trust, becoming his political confidant and first foreign minister.
