Mulberry and Peach (Two Women of China)

This extraordinary novel, winner of a 1990 American Book Award, recounts the story of two women—Mulberry and Peach—who are really one. Mulberry is a young woman who has fled the turmoil of postwar China to settle in the United States. Unable to forget the terrors she has witnessed or resolve the conflicts between her new life and her old, she develops a second personality: fearless, tough-talking, sexually uninhibited, Peach. While Mulberry clings to her cultural and ethical roots, Peach renounces her past to embrace the American way of life with a vengeance.

Brilliantly innovative in style, Mulberry and Peach offers a rare women's perspective on the upheavals of modern China, and presents an unforgettable portrait of the pain of cultural dislocation and the anguish of psychological disintegration.