A single act of defiance from a daughter. An impulsive decision from a father, made in a burst of anger. A life changed forever. 

“There’s a scene in your story that’s unrealistic. The one where your main character’s marriage was arranged so quickly. In those days, matchmaking could take years, especially between old, wealthy families.”

This was the feedback from a family friend who read the manuscript for Three Souls during its early stages of editing. This friend grew up in a very traditional family and had majored in Chinese literature. If my novel’s depiction of Chinese family life in the years before World War II passed her critical judgement, I could breathe a sigh of relief.

Grandmother was married under such unusual circumstances that the story of her betrothal made its way into family legend—and into my novel.

However, the scene she had flagged as unrealistic was actually based on a true event. It is in fact almost a word-for-word retelling of how my grandmother became a bride. Grandmother was married under such unusual circumstances that the story of her betrothal made its way into family legend—and into my novel.

Grandmother was born into a wealthy, progressive, and well-educated family. At the turn of the century, when the Qing Dynasty was drawing its last gasps, the Qu clan began sending their sons to university in Japan and Europe, and their daughters to private girls’ schools in China. Grandmother possessed a keen mind, worked hard for her grades, and cherished a modest ambition to teach school one day. Her father, however, would not allow his clever daughter a career. It was not for lack of money or because the right sort of schools were not available; there were some very well-respected women’s universities in China she could’ve attended. Women of their family, he declared, did not work.

Determined to take control of her destiny even if it meant disobeying her father, Grandmother found a surprising ally when she confided in her own grandmother. The old woman gave her money for tuition and a train ticket. But in such a large household, secrets were impossible to hide. Grandmother made her escape but only got as far as the railway station before she was caught and dragged home. She had openly defied her father’s authority during a time when the family patriarch’s word was law.

Her punishment came a week later.

In a fit of anger, her father had arranged her marriage to the son of a man he had just met on a business trip. The wedding, which followed almost immediately, sealed her fate. She moved to the small town where her husband and his family lived, far away from her beloved sisters and the cultured sophistication of the Qu estate. It must have felt like live burial.

The Qu family was considered modern because their sons were educated to Western standards. But then as now, Western values were adopted unevenly, selectively and not at the same pace—especially for women. Thus Grandmother knew there was more to life than the closed-in world of courtyards, but she had to remain within that world. She may have seethed at this injustice, or perhaps her spirit was broken after the failure of her one rebellious act. Whatever her feelings, once she was married, Grandmother quietly slipped into the role she had been raised to perform: of dutiful wife, daughter-in-law and mother.  

When I began writing Three Souls, I knew it had to include this unwanted marriage and the circumstances leading up to it. The story refused to take shape until the day an image came to me: a young woman’s ghost perched in the roof beams of a small temple, looking down at her own funeral. I knew immediately this had to be the opening of the novel.

I also knew the ghost had to be the novel’s narrator because my grandmother’s sad story has haunted me since the day I first heard it. Furthermore, it felt right to make the protagonist a ghost who could not be seen or heard, unable to impact events in the real world. She was like all those generations of Chinese women who’d had to act behind the scenes, working indirectly to influence outcomes, nudging circumstances through undetected means to achieve their goals.

In life, my grandmother had no champions. With Three Souls, I wanted to give her some small token of recognition to acknowledge her talent and the difference she might have made, if not for an impulsive decision made in anger by an all-powerful parent.  

Canadian author Janie Chang was born in Taiwan and grew up in the Philippines, Iran and Thailand. She now lives in Vancouver with her husband. Three Souls, her debut novel, was based on her grandmother's life in 1930s China. Find out more on her website.

Born in America to Afghani parents, author Nadia Hashimi grew up hearing her parents’ stories of the thriving Afghanistan they left in the 1970s. But when she finally visited decades later, she found a struggling country that bore little resemblance to their memories—especially in the way women were treated. Because of the increasing restrictions on female freedom, the custom of  bacha posh, the practice of dressing a daughter as a son, has become common. Hashimi’s first novel, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, traces that modern tradition back to its possible origin, a time when women dressed as men to guard the king’s harem. Here, the author explains how these two cultural flashpoints inspired her debut.

In 2002, I took my first trip to Kabul, Afghanistan. I was accompanied by my parents, who had left the country in the early 1970s, a peaceful and progressive time in the nation’s tumultuous history. We reunited with family, explored conditions of local hospitals and searched through piles of rubble where a family home once stood. It was a bittersweet experience for us all, especially my parents, who often felt foreign in their own homeland. This was not the country they had left behind. The decades of war in Afghanistan set the nation back in a devastating way. My mother and her sisters all attended college and worked alongside men in the airline industry, international organizations and engineering companies. From what we have seen on the news in the last few years, it is hard to imagine such an Afghanistan ever existed.

I was raised in a family that valued education above everything else. As a woman, it’s painful for me to hear that girls were barred from attending school under the Taliban regime. It’s heartbreaking to hear that girls and women have become victims of the country’s many plagues: opium addiction, widespread corruption, poverty, domestic violence and child marriage.

These are not problems unique to Afghanistan. They are found all around the world, in developing and developed nations. But in the landscape of a country ruined by decades of war, these crises have exploded.

The custom of bacha posh allows girls to dress as boys until puberty, but does a taste of freedom make the restrictions of life as a woman harder to bear?

I happened to read a New York Times article that explored the Afghan bacha posh tradition (converting young girls into boys by cutting their hair, changing their names and donning boys’ clothing). The community accepts the charade because there is a collective understanding that a family needs sons to have honor and to have someone who can go to the market freely or work outside the home. It struck me that the bacha posh tradition was an incredibly problematic practice. It gave young girls a taste of life as a boy in a deeply patriarchal society. But what would happen when that “boy” hit puberty? That’s when these boys are converted back to girls, sent back into their homes and stripped of the liberties they enjoyed for a few years.

Is it better to have tasted that liberty, if only for a short time? Or does that make life as a woman even harder to bear?

The article also touched on a time in Afghan history when women were disguised as men to serve as guards for the king’s harem. A storyline began to form in my mind, linking two different girls, in two different times, both dressed as boys in Afghanistan. Rahima is a young bacha posh who is married off by her opium-​addicted father to a local warlord. Her great-great-grandmother, Shekiba, is an orphan of the cholera epidemic who is forced to rely on her own strength and determination to survive and finds herself serving as a guard in King Habibullah’s harem. Rahima’s will is strengthened by learning her ancestor’s story. She knows she is the legacy of a formidable woman, and that knowledge helps her survive her bleakest days. Through their connection, I wanted to trace the history of women in the country.

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell is a novel with two stories steeped in tragedy, but if you put your ear to the ground, you can hear the rumblings of a brighter tomorrow coming. I could not bear to tell the story if I did not believe that to be true.

Afghanistan was once a country where sisters held the same potential as their brothers. Things fell apart in the years of bloodshed, and girls have suffered unimaginably. I wanted to give a voice to those girls of Afghanistan, the ones who are bartered in marriage before their time, denied a chance to sit in a classroom and turned into mothers before they can live out their childhoods.

Change is coming, though. We have our first female pilots, generals, political leaders, performers, scientists and athletes in decades. I am hopeful that they will forge the way to a future where Rahima’s story will be a tale from Afghanistan’s darker past.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, writer Tiphanie Yanique spins her debut novel from that country's rich history. The saga of one remarkable family across generations, Land of Love and Drowning draws from folklore as well as real-life events, and the result is a magical first novel. In a behind-the-book essay, Yanique explains how she combined the truth from old wives tales with the facts from history books to create a unique truth.

"The master race in front!” The shouting men barged onto the bus in their uniforms. The passengers shrunk down out of shock and fear as the men broke down the wooden sign that read “Coloreds” at the back of the bus. The men themselves were nonwhite, but their uniforms were those of the U.S. Army. This made what the men were saying very strange and very frightening. The bus driver ducked from behind the wheel and ran into the street.

In the U.S. Virgin Islands there are many stories about the anti-segregation disruption caused by the local men who served in the military during World War II. This one in particular is the story I was told about what happened when some of the men from the so-called West Indian Companies were stationed in New Orleans. My great uncle Sigurd Peterson Sr. and my grandfather Andre Galiber Sr. were both part of this civil disobedience. Sigurd was mostly Danish, but he had a brownish tinge to his skin, either from being born and raised in the Caribbean or because of the remaining diversity in his bloodline. Andre was mostly black, descended from Africans, but there were also Asians and white Europeans in his ancestry.

These soldiers, born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, had never experienced segregation before—certainly not in a formal way. Their shouts of “master race” was newly acquired jargon . . . a racist jargon to be sure, but shouted from their darker faces and Caribbean mouths it was subversive enough to get them put in jail or lynched. But actually, what race were these men anyway? Some of them seemed white. Others looked black. Yet they were declaring themselves to be of the same race.

That the men declared themselves the master race was peculiar because they were of mixed racial background. If they were of the master race, then it meant that everyone could be, perhaps that everyone was. These men tore down the sign of bigotry, but they didn’t erect another. Later, Jesse Owens, the African American gold medalist who at the time served in the state department as a sort of consultant on race relations, was brought in to calm the Virgin Islands soldiers and explain the reasoning behind segregation. The soldiers booed Owens until he had to be escorted out.

"An old wives’ tale is generally thought to come from myth and superstition, and so should be considered with derision. . . . In my family, however, it is the older women who are the historians."

As is the case with many former soldiers, no one wanted to openly talk about the conflicts they had. Sigurd and Andre never offered this story. But there was the story anyway, corroborated by many of the women who knew them. The soldiers had been twice segregated. Not only separated by white and black, they were also set aside in their own West Indian companies, segregated from the other American companies, the white and the black ones. They and their compatriots had participated in a vital struggle. I researched this episode and others in books I dug up in the library and found in the bookstores. But I first learned it from the wives, girlfriends and daughters of these men.

Land of Love and Drowning is narrated by the “old wives” of the island. They are the ones who receive and pass on the stories, including this one about the soldiers in New Orleans. An "old wives’ tale" is generally a label given to a story thought to come from myth and superstition, and so should be considered with derision. But worse, an old wives’ tale is one that is often considered false in part because it is told by old women.

In my family, however, it is the older women who are the historians. So in Land of Love and Drowning I made the old wives the authoritative narrators. Other narrators (a male, and two younger women) tell their versions. But it is the old wives who, because of their age, have a long view of the history and, because of their intimate relationships (lovers and mothers), have the deepest understanding of the community. They are not the always the political actors in the novel but they are the recorders. They are the historians.

I wrote many parts of Land of Love and Drowning based on the history I first learned from my grandmother. It is was the story of the male soldiers, my real ancestors, who helped me frame the novel within the political framework of the Virgin Islands becoming American. Virgin Islands soldiers fought aggressively and publically against Jim Crow—and they did so while in U.S. military uniform. These men in my family helped make a small part of history that sealed the Virgin Islands to Americanness. But I needed the old wives to tell me the history to begin with. 

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