Book Review: Spring Flower Book One: A Tale of Two Rivers by Jean Twen-Hwa Perkins, MD

Spring Flower Book One: A Tale of Two Rivers (1931-1951) is a story of resilience and survival during a time of relentless cultural and historical change. In this first volume of a three-book memoir, the author, Jean Tren-Hwa Perkins, covers a harrowing 20-year span. She was born with everything already stacked against her: she was born during the catastrophic Yangtze River flood of 1931. Her rural, peasant family couldn’t care for an infant daughter —”Sons are much more valuable,” she recounts her mother saying. Her life and marriage made her a target of the Chinese regime; her back and forth childhood between China, America, China and then America rendered her perpetually displaced.

Luck came her way when American missionaries agreed to take her in, though this also forged that sense of dual identity, not to mention abandonment: it was her mother who begged them to take her. As she great up, the world sparked her imagination, forging the mind of a storyteller, though her circumstances forced her to concentrate on sheer survival and adapting. Somehow, she recorded everything to memory: people, details, place, the feel of the air, the smell of food cooking and the chatter of passers-by.  

What lends the book its quiet strength is the restraint and matter-of-factness of Perkins’ voice: she doesn’t embellish or decorate. In this story of highs and lows, love and loss, the pace doesn’t slow down for one or the other, which lends a sense of truth. Perkins doesn’t write for drama, she writes for accuracy, even when the scene is tragic: starvation, poverty, bureaucratic cruelty, political ruthlessness— at one point, her husband is imprisoned by the Red Guards. 

It seems as if the impetus for writing this memoir wasn’t entertainment, but to take an account of all those years and what they meant. She was unable to complete it before her death at the age of 83, having lived a full life and enjoyed professional success in her field of opthamology. That’s where her son, Richard Perkins Hsung, comes in. When China reopened to the West in the 1980s and his mother decided to return to America, he was one of the first teenagers to leave the country. After his mother’s death, he dutifully fulfilled his promise to her to usher her memoir into the world. According to a terrific interview he did in Medium, it took him some ten years. On the book cover, he’s listed as “editor.” 

Spring Flower is many things without really trying to be. In its tidy paperback package, it feels important, like its own story exceeds its own size. This is an immigrant story that comes at a time when migrants are facing new crackdowns and immigrants are struggling against a hostile administration. It paints a picture of an era in Chinese history that deserves to be far better understood. It’s the story of a woman who pushed against every obstacle but neither glorifies her accomplishments (of which there are many) or complains (she has plenty of reasons to). And it’s a son’s commitment to honor a mother’s memory as few do. The interview mentions that it took Richard Perkins Hsung a decade to pore through his mother’s manuscripts. The outcome is a true labor of love.

Profusely illustrated with photographs from the family archives, maps, explanations of Chinese characters and terms. Published, along with Spring Flower books 2 and 3, by Earnshaw Books.

**Originally published at Vents Magazine