- From the publisher : A Mortal Flower, Han Suyin's second volume on the China that evolved during the last fifty years, continues the story of an epoch as seen and experienced by herself and her family. The period covered by A Mortal Flower is the decade from 1928 to 1938, when Chiang Kaishek rose to power and Mao Tsetung in his mountain fastness gathered the spent remnants of an almost destroyed communist army and rebuilt it as a force. The Japanese invasion, the Long March, the Student Revolt of 1936-all these hap- pened in China while Hitler and Mussolini hypnotized Europe with their prep- arations for war. Throughout this momentous sequence of events, Han Suyin was growing up and becoming conscious - because of her double heritage-of what went on in both East and West, at a time when each was too preoccupied to notice the other. While Europe mourned Czechoslovakia's rape by the Germans, millions were slaughtered in China, dying unheard and uncared for. She describes at first hand the ambiguous position of Eurasians, isolated between white rulers and downtrodden natives; her meetings with Nehru and Teilhard de Chardin, when neither was yet famous; the student demonstrations and movements, and the choice she finally made because 'justice demands the evidence of all our life'. This is an extraordinary and vivid book with its striking personal detail, its breadth of view in the treatment of historical events, and the personal glimpses it gives of Chiang Kaishek, Mao Tsetung and others, not only as historical figures but as human beings. A Mortal Flower continues The Crippled Tree yet stands on its own, a complete and unforgettable record of our time.