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Most of the students there came from the wealthy merchant families of the coast; my grandfather was an outsider, like a scholarship boy from a Colorado mining town showing up at Harvard. But as a center of progressive learning, the university also attracted other ambitious young people from the provinces. One contemporary of my grandfather who worked in the school library was Mao Zedong. My grandfather likely struggled with the New Learning. In the Peking University archives, I found a book bound with string that listed, in spidery calligraphy, the exam results for pre-law students in 1917. Foreign subjects were not my grandfather’s strong suit.

WESTERN HISTORY: 70

ENGLISH LITERATURE: 70

CHINESE LANGUAGE: 80

LOGIC: 90

BEHAVIOR: 100

If the traditional value system had been intact, my grandfather would have obtained the highest university degree and gotten a job in government. But the New Learning was taking him in unexpected directions: My grandfather won a provincial scholarship to study in America, so he quit school after his sophomore year. He married a young woman named Li Xiulan who had been chosen by his family—three days after the wedding, he boarded a ship for America.

My grandmother was then studying at Peking Women’s Normal College, one of the first colleges in the country to accept female students. She majored in physical education and music; she marched in student protests and smoked cigarettes and chose a new name, Li Xiangheng, because it had more unusual characters than her old one. After graduation she taught high school in Jilin City, the provincial capital.

For seven years she wrote letters to America, the land that had consigned her to spending her twenties alone, and the land that would later claim her children, one by one. Her letters have not survived. All that remains of the young woman she was is contained in a few terse sentences in my grandfather’s diary, like the bright flash of a forest animal glimpsed through the trees: her solicitude, loneliness, sparks of ill temper.

Xiangheng plans to return home because my mother is sick.

I bought a pair of shoes to send home for Xiangheng.

In Xiangheng’s letter she creates an uproar, saying she has suffered a great wrong.

I got three letters from Xiangheng, all urging me to go home. Because my own plans are not finished, I cannot return yet.

My grandmother wished to go to America too, but my great-grandfather laid down the law. Foreign countries were not for women, he said. A woman should stay home.

* * *

January 1, 1926

China’s internal chaos is a cause of much worry. China will surely have one day when it is prosperous. I will see this in my lifetime. Every person must work hard for the coming of this day.

My personal conduct must be honorable and in my dealings I must be more frugal.

I had lunch with my landlord, Harry Weart. His neighbors, an old couple, like to play with dogs and birds and they spoke of their pets. I am disgusted by this kind of talk.

My grandfather arrived in America in 1920. It was the era of bathtub gin, petting parties, and Al Capone, but he barely noticed. In the pages of his diary, he wrote about his search for a proper course of study and about the political situation in China. These two subjects were connected: By acquiring the right skills in America, he would learn what was necessary to help his homeland become a modern nation. He flirted with literature and economics before settling on mining engineering: Industrial development would be China’s salvation.

During his seven years in America, the situation back home deteriorated. The national government basically ceased to exist, as warlords with personal armies fought one another across the country. In my grandfather’s American diaries of the 1920s, the people who loomed largest were the Chinese warlords Wu Peifu and Zhang Zuolin.

January 26

Zhang Zuolin has already set free Ivanov [the Russian director of the Chinese Eastern Railway], so the Harbin question is temporarily resolved. The