Ashes of the Republic

In 1949, the country was engulfed in war and corpses lay everywhere. The young Chunxing had been living a poor but peaceful life in a water town south of the Yangtze River, until a sudden famine shattered her world. The bark had been stripped from the trees, and her parents put her up for sale to buy food. She witnessed the collapse of all human decency: children abandoned, women trafficked, and even the hellish spectacle of people eating their own children to survive.

On the road as a refugee, she was captured by bandits and caught in the fighting between warlords. Passed from one faction to another like a piece of merchandise, she saw the servility hidden behind the title of “warlord's wife” and suffered the humiliation of a conquered nation beneath the Japanese army's iron heel. From a village girl to a servant in the foreign concessions, from being forced into prostitution to fighting back, Chunxing struggled to survive through hunger, violence, and humiliation. Every step she took fell on the bones of her countrymen, and every breath she drew was stained with blood and tears.

This is no glamorous legend. It is a dirge written in the lives of millions of women from the lowest rungs of society, revealing the cruel history, steeped in death, behind the whitewashed “romance of the Republic of China.”