Description

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Maybe there is a life after death? And maybe it's not just our lives continuing, our past chronicles, and the souls that circled us from other life times, will find its way to be our companionship again, in the this life and maybe in the next life time too. This novel is based on a real story- Is it a coincidence or a real phenomena of reincarnation? You'll be the judge. 1989, when a sassy writer, Tseng Li Wha, in her thirties, constantly gets silent phone calls in the deepest of the nights, she hears the voice of the phantom, sighs from the other end of the phone, waking her up, night after night. In the beginning she's appalled, then she's annoyed by it. She finally gets her bravery together and asks him "it's quite late, mister, what do you want?" Surprisingly, the phantom speaks up and calls her by the old name, which no one in the city of Taipei would have known, he has a strong accent from Northern China. Seventeen years ago, Li Wha, without telling her parents, she left China during the Great Cultural Revolution, and because of the political conflicts between Taiwan and China, she has never seen her parents over the course of seventeen years. She's now 34 years old, and a successful writer. Lee Hun Min is a sophisticated gentleman that no one would suspect of doing such a thing, is the one who is calling Li Wha at the quietest time of the night. He told her he just came back from Kunming of China and has met with her parents in a coincidental event, so naturally her parents asked him to bring her some old souvenirs of hers- her pictures from childhood, a few color faded pictures of her parents and her brothers and sisters, and her old violin. Her emotion is at the mawkish point, then he shows her a picture of a young girl, about the age of seventeen- "oh, that's me " Li Wha says it delightfully, then she looks at it again, she realizes that it's not her The girl in the picture looks melancholy and fragile, unlike Li Wha, who is full of vitality and energetic, but otherwise they look exactly the same. Suddenly, she beings to have memento recollections of the past - she was a high school girl in a uniform, she was on a podium of her school, other students were screaming and accusing her as the anti-communists right-wing, a bourgeois, as they throwing rocks and garbage at her. She sees herself working in the cemetery, endless human bones were everywhere. Vaguely, she sees a benign but homely old lady sheltering her in an old tumbling building, who calls her madam which is a title Li Wah can't bear- a bourgeois, a title puts her in a such predicament. She remembers she was that languished girl in the picture and played a violin perfectly, the way she could never have done; she hears her own voice speaking with a strong Northern China accent where she never had been. She sees the youthful Lee Hun Min quietly standing in a corner of a beautiful, well lit Victorian style house, the guests were sophisticated and important, but she could care less. She was the center of the event- "oh, it was my seventeenth birthday, 1955, in Harbin, China...

About the Author

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Tseng Yen is a multiple award winning author from Taipei, Taiwan. She was born in the city of Kunming of China. She escaped from China while the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution were crippling the country. She was only a high school student, schools were shut down, educators were accused as the anti-communists right wings. She and her high school sweet heart, Yang Lin, then husband with four other students crossed the boarder of China to Burma, and were captured and were put in the jail as illegal immigrants. Some local Chinese people helped her and her husband got out of jail a year after the captures. They finally got to Thailand where both of them were teaching in a school of a refugee village in Northern Thailand. She began her writing career during the nights, under a tiny yellow oil lit light, after long days of teaching and taking care of her two little daughters. Her first book the "Rainbow Jade" quickly became the sensation in Taiwan and in the Chinese communities around the world. This development has ignited attentions to the destitute Village, and eventually led her to the free world - Taiwan. She had about twenty books published, and was a literature editor in the Youth Daily News of Ministry of National Defense for thirty years. She is now retired and enjoying taking care of and playing with her beloved first granddaughter.