"In the process of uncovering the family history my mother would never talk about, I found three women who had been her high school classmates in Taiwan. America had changed them, and they had changed it. And in spite of these changes, my mother had maintained a bond with each of the women that defied the years and distance between them".In 1937, the year Leslie Chang's mother was born, the city of Nanking was destroyed by Japanese invaders with instructions from the Emperor to "kill all; destroy all; burn all". Eleven years later, when the Red Army marched into China, Han Man-li's family fled to Taiwan. It was there, at an elite girl's school in Taipei, that Han Man-li met Xiao Mei, Ling, and Ma-hua. They became close friends, sharing secrets, confidences, and the uncertainty of a country in turmoil. A few years later, they would leave their homeland, passing through the "narrow gate" of the First Girl's School on their way to America.
Student visas and scholarships brought them to the United States, but for Han Man-li, Xiao Mei, Ling, and Ma-hua -- now Mary, Dolores, Suzanne, and Margaret -- their journey was just beginning. Adrift in a strange land, forced to adapt to foreign ways, they reinvented themselves as Chinese Americans. Yet even as they assimilated into a new society, they could not leave behind the traditions that shaped their young lives -- or a past that, to this day, still evokes fear.
In cities as far apart as New York and Los Angeles, from the biology lab of a women's college to Wall Street to the gilded Chinese ghetto in California's Palos Verdes, Mary, Dolores, Suzanne, and Margaret made their choices and their compromises. That is part of the legacy theyhave passed on to their children. And the memories: Memories of leaving China with gold bars sewn into a belt. Memories of a grandmother, an opium addict with bound feet whose shoes measured three-and-a-half inches; of piano lessons taught by a Russian emigre; of the family home that was razed to make room for the paving stones of Tiananmen Square; of kneeling in white burlap on a warm May afternoon, waiting for the train that would bring a dead father's body home.
Beyond the Narrow Gate is the story of four women whose lives took divergent paths, yet who will always be bound by their shared heritage. It is a moving, insightful portrait of what it means to be a foreigner in America, to move from world to world without ever belonging to either -- a truth that is at the heart of the immigrant experience.
