A Thousand Miles of Dreams

the long version

The biography of two intensely rivalrous Chinese sisters, a writer and a doctor, whose eventful lives took very different paths in their quest to be independent women. Daughters of an imperial scholar-official and a concubine, the two sisters followed professional trajectories unimaginable to their parents' generation, one emigrating to America and the other achieving fame in China as a writer, but also leaving China in 1945. They were Chinese modern girls who sought to forge their own way during a period of social revolution that unsettled relations between men and women--and among nations.--From publisher description.