Flying against the Wind
Marriage of a Bloomsbury Chinese Literati
by
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With a pipe in his mouth, Teacher Ma said smiling: “My student Yuan Yin is about to graduate. I am worried that she could fall into the hands of rascals when she enters society. So I have found her an ideal husband, this gentle Mr Chun Chan Yeh.” Everyone applauded: “Really a perfectly matched couple! Mr Ma, you have good eyes.” Mrs Ma continued: “As soon as Ma met Mr Yeh, he wanted to introduce him to Yuan Yin. Today is their engagement day.”
Suddenly someone cried out in loud voice, which astonished everyone.
It was Shao Mi, their son sitting between us. He pushed Chun Chan fiercely and scratched two blood marks on his face: “Yuan Yin is my Darling. I will marry her! She can't marry this man, never!”
Mrs Ma took him away immediately and said: “You are still too young. Yuan Yin cannot wait. She will have a daughter who will be as pretty as she is. Let her daughter be your friend.”
“No way,” Shao Mi kept crying loudly: “I will freeze Yuan Yin in a refrigerator for twenty years, so that she will stay young and wait for me.”
That was the unexpected incident we experienced on our engagement day. Now I am an old lady of 85 and my little brother Shao Mi is over 60..
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About the Book
A "wrongly arranged marriage" lasted 57 years. All the sufferings during Japanese War, long separation between China and the West, all brutal communist political campaigns, fatal cancer attack, etc, deepened the love. The wife eventually became friends with the rivals in love in both China and the West. Love beaten cancer, enabling her husband to focus on publishing over 2 millions words after his retirement at 80. Yuan Yin started to write "Flying against the Wind" in Chinese at the age of 83 and completed at 85. Then her grandson George Yeh keyed the text into computer and her son Nien Lun Yeh finalized it. The book tells how one can really enjoy both love and life from all kinds of unavoidable human sufferings. It was published and recommended as one of the best 60 Women's Books of the Year 2000 in China, and then translated into English by Nien Lun Yeh
About the Author
Yuan Yin, aged 91, the wife of a famous Chinese multi-linguistic writer and translator and the only Bloomsbury Chinese literati Chun Chan Yeh, to whom she married for 57 years. She transcribed her husband's manuscripts for over 40 years, so she was also the first reader and critic of her husband's books. This developed herself to be a writer and published a lot too. She is now the member of the Chinese Writers Association. She is a pretty, charming, sociable and open-minded lady, and managed to develop even closer friendships with all her husband's Western female friends whom he knew when he was in Europe during the second world war.