Destinies Divided: a World War One Romance of the Chinese Diaspora

This is the second book in the Trilogy of the Chinese Diaspora, following the fortunes of Zhou Yu's children as they move between the worlds of New Zealand, China, America, and the trenches of the Western Front. At the end of the first book, Memories in the Bone, China is on the brink of civil war. The Boxers, after cruelly murdering many missionaries around north China, are finally defeated in their fifty-five day siege of Beijing. The triumphant foreign Eight Nations exact crippling penalties, stripping China of all her sovereign rights, bringing her to her knees. The ruling Qing Dynasty is doomed to end when the Dowager Empress Cixi dies in 1908 and the eleven year old Puyi, the Last Emperor, succeeds to the throne. But on October 10th 1911, the Republic is declared. The three children of Zhou Yu and the former Maori slave, Horowhai, struggle with the problems engendered by their mixed race. Standing on a cultural divide they are not accepted by either and each struggles to forge his destiny in the turbulent times. Meanwhile the abandoned Chinese son takes his revenge by qualifying as a doctor in America to live the American dream. Two sons of foreign missionaries must question their loyalties when confronted by these Chinese. Destinies Divided: A World War 1 Romance of the Chinese Diaspora takes them through a journey of over ten thousand miles and pitches them all together in Flanders where each must create his own reality as he watches the destruction of his fellow men in the cruellest war in modern history. A war in which nearly 200,000 Chinese coolies, unsung and forgotten, struggle and die in an attempt to regain China?s self-respect as a sovereign nation. Only to be betrayed at the end of it.