In the late 1940s the Chen family gathered for a dusk-time ritual at their hillside home in Berkeley, California to "watch the sun go home" to their native China. Having fled persecution in Chunking during the Sino-Japanese war (1937-45), the Chens settled briefly in Peking, then escaped to the U.S. during the intensifying civil war.

Repatriated and classified as "national bourgeois" in the early 1950s, following the peaceful Communist takeover of Peking, the Chens were yet to endure the cataclysmic violence of the Cultural Revolution - separation, imprisonment, internal exile and "re-education" in the "cadre schools" designed for ideological criminals.

In June of 1989, while in the United States as part of an educational exchange, separated from her children in China, the author learned of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. After her condemnation of the regime was broadcast on national television, Chen Chen abandoned hope of returning to China.

The shrewd, defiant young woman whose story this is - a mother, writer, musician and book collector - tells of a life spent in two worlds, one lived in the East, one in the West; one of prosperity and privilege, one of poverty amid the tumult of history.