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Evelina Chao

Born: 1949 in Chicago, Il
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Evelina Chao was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Arlington, Virginia.

Biography: Chao eventually chose music and playing the violin and viola as her profession, attending Oberlin College and the Juilliard School before joining the Amici Quartet, Indianapolis Symphony and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra where she is currently Assistant Principal Viola, she continually grappled with the issue of identity.


Awards:

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction; Non-Fiction

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Email: contact@evelinachao.com
Website: http://www.evelinachao.com/index.html
Evelina Chao on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=evelina++chao


Selected Titles

Gates of grace
ISBN: 0446513032 OCLC: 12108081

Warner Books, New York, NY : ©1985.

A young Chinese woman, Mei-yu comes to the United States at the time of the Chinese revolution. Here she must make a new life for herself and her daughter when her husband is unexpectedly killed.

Gates of grace /
ISBN: 0446328448 OCLC: 14630109

Warner Books, New York : 1986, 1985.

Yeh Yeh's house /
ISBN: 0312330774 OCLC: 54929746

St. Martin's Press, New York : 2004.

The author discusses her childhood in 1950s America, describing how she forged her sense of identity from the life and letters of her grandfather and journeyed with her mother to China to learn more about her heritage.

Yeh yeh's house :
ISBN: 9781429902724 OCLC: 865022826

St. Martin's Press, New York : 2013.

Growing up Chinese in Virginia in the Fifties, Evelina Chao's sense of historical or cultural context was colored by the images contained in her grandfather Yeh-Yeh's letters and news of his life as an eminent poet, philosopher, and theologian in Beijing. Her geologist father and biologist mother suffered a kind of cultural dyslexia in the American South, having fled Beijing after the Maoist Revolution in 1949. The young Evelina, foreign and isolated, believed that in China she would find the meaning of her life. And then she found music. The rigors of training to become a professional classical musician seduced her into thinking she no longer required Yeh-Yeh's benediction, that her Chinese heritage was secondary. When Yeh-Yeh died at 92, she realized that her mythical notions of China had died with him. All that reminded her were her uncles and aunts who still lived in the family house in Beijing. Accompanied by her mother, acting as her interpreter and all-around passport, she traveled to Beijing when China was undergoing rapid transformation following the Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s, two years before the Tiananmen uprising. Every trace of old China was being expunged, the ancient neighborhoods plowed under. Yeh-Yeh's House is a voyage of self-discovery and mother-daughter understanding set against the backdrop of a China that no longer exists.

 

 

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