Sisters Jun and Hong were inseperable until, in their twenties, they were separated by chance at the end of the Chinese Civil War. It would be thirty years before the sisters were able to communicate again, with Jun remaining on the Communist mainland and Hong emigrating to the US. What sounds like the plot of a novel is actually the true account of author Zhuqing Li's own aunts, whose lives were upended by politics and governments in ways they could not have imagined