Please join us for a Q&A with Eve J. Chung, author of Daughters of Shandong.
Eve J. Chung is a Taiwanese American human rights lawyer focusing on gender equality and women’s rights. She lives in New York with her husband, two children, and two dogs. Her first novel, Daughters of Shandong, won the 2024 BookBrowse Debut award. It was a First Impressions choice and was a featured online discussion book as well. Her second novel, The Young Will Remember, will be published in May 2026.
Please use this space to ask Eve questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Eve, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
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Thank you so much for inviting me to be here! I am a lawyer by day, and write in the evenings. I have two kids, and started writing my debut novel when my youngest turned one. It was always a dream of mine to become an author, and to be honest I didn’t think that it would happen. DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG began as my effort to record a family history, and ended up being so much more than that! I’ve been very happy to be able to write more stories since then.
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It sounds like you may have have your grandmother’s story rolling around in your imagination for a while. What made you say to yourself, “I’m going to do this and I’m going to do this now”? Was there something that encouraged you to start writing when you did?
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In the author’s note for Daughters of Shandong you describe the challenges you experienced while researching much of the book. What kept you going when you ran into roadblocks?
I know that when you started writing, you realized there were gaps in what you knew about your grandmother’s history, and that you had to fictionalize much of the book. Please share with us some of the parts of your grandmother’s life that you learned from her or others, and some that you had to completely fictionalize.
So I actually didn’t think much about my grandmother’s story until I had my own kids. My grandmother and I were close, and I was always sad that my kids never got to meet her. DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG came about when I was visiting my mom, with my two kids in tow. We were talking about my grandmother, and my mom finally told me bits of the story that I had never heard before. I had always assumed that my grandmother took a boat from Qingdao to Taipei, since both are port cities. I didn’t know that the route was closed by the time my grandmother wanted to leave, and that she had to go all the way to Hong Kong–a thousand mile journey. My mom told me that my great-grandmother forged a travel authorization by using a bar of soap to make a stamp. It was that moment when I said, “Wow, this is amazing. This could be a book.” That was when I started to write the book, and interview my relatives–in March 2022!
This began as a family project, and my first step was to interview my mom for all the information that she had. There were some aspects of the journey that my mom knew well, but others that my grandmother never told her. Originally I had wanted the book to be creative non-fiction, but there were too many holes in the story, and so I turned it into a work of fiction. We didn’t know much about what happened in Qingdao, and since that wasn’t really a major city for the Chinese Civil War, it was hard to find information about it too. I ended up resorting to diaries and photos from US marines stationed in Qingdao, to piece together what the city had been like shortly before it switched from Nationalist to Communist control. The research was extensive, because I also wasn’t sure what that meant for the government workers like Cousin Wei–Qingdao was a city in transition. From the US marines though, I found old maps (in English!) of Qingdao, but also testimony on how severe the refugee crisis was. I think from my work as a lawyer, I’m used to doing a lot of research, so even in areas where it was tricky, eventually I was able to find sources that gave me enough that I could write a story from. The same applies for Rennie’s Mill–there was virtually nothing, until I found the Ph.D. thesis of a man who interviewed hundreds of people who had lived in Rennie’s Mill.
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A lot of the book is based on truth. My grandmother was indeed from Zhucheng, and the eldest of four daughters before the Chinese Civil War resumed after WWII. Three was a real person. When writing this book, I had debated whether to include “Three” or not, because she is there so briefly, but I ultimately felt like I had to include her story because it really showed how girls were treated at the time. My grandmother’s younger sister died of tuberculosis because the family was not willing to pay for medical treatment for girls. According to my mom, my great-grandmother begged the family for money for a doctor, but in the end this girl (either age two or three, we are not sure–but very young) died in her mother’s arms, despite being from a wealthy family that could have easily afforded treatment for her. “Lucky” was also a real dog, though I believe that he might have always been their dog versus them getting him from another family. According to my mom, my grandma would still talk about this talented dog that could catch rabbits and was so smart. I was surprised to learn about him, because my grandmother never seemed to like dogs, when I knew her. Maybe no dog could compare to this “Lucky”–she always said our dogs were spoiled! According to my mom, my grandma had to leave her dog behind in Qingdao when they boarded the train, and the dog ran along the tracks for as far as it could. I invented Mrs. Ding, and in the book I imagine that the book’s version of Lucky went back to Mrs. Ding’s courtyard and lived happily ever after.
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First off, I just want to say, my book club read and discussed your extraordinary debut with all these memorable characters, and all of us were awed by your story. My question to you is:
Were there any surprising discoveries during your research that changed how you approached the story?
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I loved reading Daughters of Shandong through the First Impressions program. The story was so powerful and heartfelt. Was there a moment while writing that was especially meaningful for you? Do you think you’ll continue exploring your family’s history in future books or move on to something new?
Thanks for sharing that you didn’t include the dog running after you on the train tracks - that would have made me cry!
This is great background- I will be recommending this book to my book club- I read it last year but I still remember how gut-wrenching this story was. Thank you for sharing your “back story” with us!
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I hate to say this, @Jorene_J, but that actually was in the book. I think Eve’s point is that she gave the dog a home that he could hopefully return to. And yeah, that was sad.
Thank you so much for reading my book with your book club! There were many surprising discoveries, but one of them was regarding the crossing of the border into Hong Kong. It took quite a while to uncover the truth regarding that process. In my first interviews with my mom, she had told me that my grandma was in a camp called “Tiao Jing Ling,” and originally told me that it was in Macau! I spent a few days researching refugee camps in Macau before we interviewed my grandma’s youngest sister, who told us that it was in Hong Kong. I kept trying to find information on Tiao Jing Ling, and even wrote to a historian who told me that there were no refugee camps in Hong Kong, which surprised me because I knew my grandma was in one. It wasn’t until I called my mom again, frustrated that I couldn’t find anything about Tiao Jing Ling, that she typed the name into Google in Chinese. Only then did I realize that I had been searching in the wrong language–I’d been going off the Mandarin that my own relatives use, when in Hong Kong, this camp was known by its Cantonese name, Tieu Keng Leung. Once I knew to search for Tieu Keng Leung, I was able to discover more about it! I was also working very hard to figure out the visa and entry regulations in Hong Kong, because I had read about refugees trying to sneak into Hong Kong and even swim to Hong Kong. At this point, I interviewed my grandmother’s other younger sister, and I asked, “How did you all manage to sneak across the border?”
Her answer had been simple: “We just walked across the bridge.”
I didn’t realize that even though there were some rules about entry, effectively the border had been open when my grandmother crossed it–so that ended up being one of the easiest parts of their journey!
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Thank you very much for reading! Writing the book itself was a special process in so many ways. This was the first time that I believed in myself as a writer, and really forced myself to sit down and get this book done, with the understanding that even if I never published it, at least I would have something to share with my children. One of my favorite chapters, and one that I’ve found the most meaningful, is the one in which Hai and her mom fight over the milk powder. This chapter is also rooted in truth, albeit altered. My grandma used to tell me about how her parents would give her brother milk, and only give rice water to her sister, who would always cry because she was hungry. My grandma would wake up in the middle of the night and sneak into the kitchen to mix milk for her sister, and feed her in the middle of the night. She and that sister ended up being very close. To me, that chapter is when Hai forgives her mother and realizes that she must find ways to make changes to a very broken system of preference for male children. For me, there were many aspects of sexism that I resented when I was growing up, and as I got older I began to understand why so many women end up following these traditions, even though they themselves were harmed by them. As Hai says, “Telling her I was hurt would be like saying I was offended by the typhoon that tore through Mount Davis. In her mind, these injustices were part of being a woman, and bearing them was simply our fate. Men made the rules in our society, but women often enforced them.”
In terms of future books, I wrote a second book that is not based on any family history, but does draw from aspects of my husband’s family history. My husband is half-Korean, and his grandfather was a refugee from Pyongyang. THE YOUNG WILL REMEMBER is about the Korean War, and the impact of war on women, especially mothers. I hope you will read that one too!
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“Your Ladies” displayed incredible strengths facing extreme adversity and everchanging situations. How proud you must be of all of them. How has this inner strength become apparent or observable to you when thinking about your mother and her siblings, if she has sisters in particular? Your determination to research and write in the midst of a career and raising a family reflects your strengths!
Thank you for developing such dynamic characters. We readers felt their emotions, conflicts, and determination.
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Di was actually my favorite person in the book; I admired her spirit and determination to survive. Is she one of your great aunts that is still alive, is that correct? Are/were you in contact with her? How did your grandmother’s other siblings fare?