Chasing Hepburn: A Memoir of Shanghai, Hollywood, and a Chinese Family's Fight for Freedom

By Gus Lee

Book Overview

Chasing Hepburnis the story of the Lee family-a saga spanning four generations, two continents, and a century and a half of Chinese history. In the masterful hands of acclaimed author Gus Lee, his ancestors' stories spring vividly to life in a memoir with all the richness of great fiction. From the time of her birth in 1906 it was expected that Gus Lee's mother, Tzu Da-tsien, would become an elegant bride for a wealthy provincial man. But she was shunted onto a less certain path by age three, when her warmhearted father rescued her from her foot-binding ceremony in response to her terrified screams. This dramatic rejection of tradition was the first of many clashes that would lock the family in a constant struggle between Chinese customs and modern ways. Later, with the Chinese countryside in the grip of civil war, the Tzu family moved to Shanghai, seeking financial stability. There Da-tsien met Lee Zee Zee, the dashing son of the Tzus' landlord, who lived across the street. With their patriarch succumbing to opium addiction, Zee Zee's family was on the brink of ruin, and Da-tsien's mother was working hard to secure her big-footed daughter's marriage to a wealthy older man. But not even the protests of both families could keep the lovers apart, and these two socially displaced clans were reluctantly united. Over the course of their courtship and marriage, Zee Zee and Da-tsien would encounter the most important movements and figures of the times, including underworld gangsters, Communist students and workers, revolutionary armies, Christian missionaries, and legions of invading Japanese soldiers. Zee Zee became an ardent anti-Maoist and an ally of the highest-ranking leaders in the Chinese Nationalist movement. But his flights from tradition took him away from his young family-first into Chiang Kai-shek's air force and later to America in search of his idol, Katharine Hepburn. Faced with this abandonment and with the chaos of the Japanese occupation, Da-tsien would rely on all of her resources, traditional and modern-faith, superstition, tremendous courage, and her strong feet-in an attempt to preserve her family. Gus Lee takes us straight into the heart of twentieth-century Chinese society, offering a clear-eyed yet compassionate view of the forces that repeatedly tore apart and reconfigured the lives of his parents and their contemporaries. He moves deftly from recounting intimate household conversations to discussing major historical events, and the resulting story is by turns comic, harrowing, heroic, and tragic. For most of her life, Da-tsien prayed for a son who would honor his family and respect his Chinese heritage. In this enthralling tribute, Gus Lee lovingly accomplishes both.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0609608762
• ISBN13: 9780609608760
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Harmony
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.4" x 1.5" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

Very good book

I really enjoyed this book. Highly recommended to all who are interested in Chinese culture and history.

A Chinese War and Peace

About two thirds through this book that amazed and taught me so much about the 20th century civil war and liberation of China, I realized I was reading something akin to the book that 40 years ago showed me one of the awesome values of great fiction. Gus Lee describes Chasing Hepburn as his first work of non-fiction, but the book has the magic of fiction (and surely takes its liberties), and like Tolstoi's War and Peace it shows us an immense historical moment through the eyes and hearts of a few families. With strange but compassionate humor, Lee shows a family whose allegiance and survival lies with Chiang Kai Shek but whose heart is really with Mao Tse Tung. As Tolstoi mined a great wealth of family and historical lore to write his book, so Lee mined the memories of his sisters, others, and especially his father, a Kuomintang pilot, adventurer, secret agent, banker's henchman, and all-around outrageous character whose lifelong lament seems to be, "If only those stupid generals had let me go drop a bomb on Mao!" while at the same time knowing firsthand what a backstabbing, bloodthirsty lot the nationalist leaders really were after the death of Sun Yat Sen. Whoa. I'm getting way too carried away with how much I liked and learned from this book! As for the title, the book does surely earn Chasing Hepburn, but it's so much more than the tale of Hollywood-struck young Chinese in Shanghai in the 1920s-1930s. It's love story, epic, thriller, and wide scope portrait of the complex, fascinating time when China's neck was under the whole world's boot.Take Me With You When You Go

Compelling cultural drama draws you in and won't let go

Get ready to give up your weekend because once you pick up this book you won't be able to put it down. Lee's dramatic descriptions cover the conflicts between historical Eastern and Western traditions woven into poignant family events. While his relatives and their antics seem quirky and particular, in fact they resonate with all families facing abrupt changes and adaptation --be they generational or cultural. For those who have read and loved China Boy and Honor and Duty, Chasing Hepburn gives us the pre-story we've all been wondering about.

A family in context

In this remarkable memoir, Gus Lee presents a clear and compassionate picture of his parents, grandparents and their 'clans' set in turbulent times. He brings alive the social, historical, religious and cultural context which informs their actions and reactions making them comprehensible to a reader with a totally different cultural viewpoint. It reads like a multi-generational adventure novel where the characters play parts in or are impacted by major events, from the Taiping rebellion through the British opium trade to the civil wars that raged from the early twentieth century through the brutal Japanese occupation in WWII. It is a wild ride and a great read. Gus presents his forbears and related characters warts and all, but always with great compassion and subtlety. There are no cardboard characters. Readers of his novels, which have a strong autobiographical base, particularly 'China Boy', will know what a hard childhood he endured with a stern and distant father, a mother prone to 'magical' beliefs who died when he was five, and a rigid, vindictive step mother. In this memoir, Gus reveals to us what he subsequently discovered about his parents and he honors them both. Gus's own life has been a testament to using adversity to build strength. He has wasted no time blaming, or scoring points off his parents or using his experiences to excuse failings in his own life. There is no 'poor me' here. His story helped me understand a completely different belief system and cultural perspective. And it was at times moving, at other times funny, but always interesting.