![]() A reunion with his estranged family spurred the spending spree for his daughter's wedding. But a chance encounter with an old acquaintance revealed that his wife and children had survived the war. Assuming his family had perished, her great-grandfather remarried and went on with his life for the next decade. As she described, her great-grandfather had been in San Francisco during the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s while her great-grandmother's family fled to Fujian. Ostensibly an act of generosity, it was also motivated, Ryan found, by a sense of immense guilt. ![]() While doing the research for her novel, Ryan uncovered the history of her grandmother's wedding, a lavish affair paid for by her great-grandfather. Ryan began by showing the parallels between her own family history and the characters in the novel, revealing that in both cases the political situation changed lives in dramatic and surprising ways. ![]() ![]() ![]() SAN FRANCISCO, AugSpeaking before the Asia Society Northern California at the Chinese Historical Society of America, Shawna Yang Ryan, author of the critically acclaimed novel Water Ghosts, shared insights into how Chinese-American history and fiction become intertwined in her writing. ![]()
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