SASHA SU-LING WELLAND
Friday, September 29 at 7:30 p.m.

Co-presented with HEDGEBROOK. Some extraordinary stories are told in University of Washington anthropology professor Sasha Su-Ling Welland's biographical and historical new book, A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters (Rowman & Littlefield). The stories are familial ones, as the central figures of this luminous book are Amy Ling Chen, the author's grandmother, and her sister, Ling Shuhua. The former, in 1925, won a scholarship to study medicine in the west. The latter, Sasha Su-Ling Welland's great-aunt, remained in China, but worked in decidedly modern circles as a painter and published writer. Her circles would include Virginia Woolf's nephew, with whom she had an affair. The connections between the China of the late 1920s and 30's with Europe and the U.S. are portrayed by way of these personal stories. There is more yet. "Welland balances family sources with meticulous research and insightful reading of Shuhua's fiction...this restrained and melancholy biography is filled with fascinating glimpses of 20th-centry Chinese women's intellectual history and insights into the Chinese-American and Anglo-Chinese experience." - Publishers Weekly.

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