“He said that if God hadn’t saved him, he would have murdered his brother.” There is a short pause. “But please don’t put that in your book Anna. Your father wouldn’t have liked that.” She hangs up her phone in Boston, as Anna drops hers down on a bedside table in Cape Town. It’s 2:00 am and Anna’s mother has ‘accidentally’ pressed the call button when she only meant to send a message, an all too frequent occurrence. But at 94 years of age, it seems fair to offer her some grace in this matter. Images of events and fragments of conversations from decades past swirl around Anna’s mind. There will be no getting back to sleep. It doesn’t matter, her days start at 4:00 am anyway. It is the only peaceful time to write. By daybreak, Anna has a few pieces of the puzzle figured out, enough to be certain that this is an entirely different story than the memoir she’s been excavating for the past 18 months. This is a prequel and, reaching a different conclusion to her mother, Anna knows unequivocally that she is meant to unravel this mystery and tell her father’s story. It’s become abundantly clear it is the key to understanding her own.

Over a period from 1949 to 1956, three of the Jiang siblings, and one spouse escape from Shanghai during the Chinese Civil War. That is what Anna is told at seven years old, the year she starts asking questions arising from the mysterious arrival of the glamorous Chinese woman at the back door at the top of the stairs leading to the porch of her family home in the suburbs of Boston. But there weren’t three. There were four. Despite her ignorance to it, Anna is given this first crumb in early 2002, as she drives her father from her house in Pokfulam to the Wan Chai District of Hong Kong for his breakfast meeting. She has long since stopped asking about his meetings as invariably they are with people in spiritual crisis and God has sent his messenger, Anna’s father, to save them. If she appears too interested, there is a strong likelihood that she will also receive a sermon, something she avoids at all costs. But there is something different about today, about her 80 year old father and his demeanor. “Dad, who are you meeting?” He faces her as she drives on the windy cliff road past Mount Davis. She is startled by his thousand-yard stare piercing right through her. “I am meeting my brother.” Having arranged a family dinner for later that week while her father is visiting, Anna knows he can’t possibly mean her Uncle Andrew. She is close to him and sees him often. Seeing her confusion, he clarifies, “I have another brother. Son Number One. Louis. I have not spoken to him in 40 years. God has instructed me to meet with him, and,” he looks away and pauses for what feels like an eternity “to forgive him.

Twenty years later, Anna berates herself for not asking more questions, recording conversations, going to meet this uncle, or tracking down his children. More precisely, she is angry with herself for not understanding the urgency to uncover the truth while her father was still alive and before the dementia took his mind away, leaving behind someone that looked like her father, but was not. She knows her father spent 13 years in Macau, that is where her parents met. But she never thought to ask how he ended up there. She always assumed it had been by choice. She knows it was a very dark time for her half-brothers, Michael and Tom. Brothers she only learned about when she was 16 by accident when Uncle Andrew let that cat out of the proverbial bag not knowing it was a meant to be kept secret from Anna and her full-brother. Anna thinks back to the lunch in Whistler, Canada, just after her 40^th birthday when her father unexpectedly opened up about a past he had never spoken about before. Maybe he knew his mind wouldn’t be with him much longer. He told her about being exiled. He talked vaguely about an opium deal and something treacherous his brother had done, but there are gaping holes in the narrative. When she presses Michael for more history, a week of successful correspondence with her half-brother turns sour and he does not speak to her again. Her ignorance to their father’s history, and his mother’s abandonment creates an unbridgeable decades’ long chasm

That morning after the phone call, Anna knows she must piece together this story. But she must act quickly. Most of the key players are dead, including her father and both his brothers. Will it be possible to find anyone still alive who will speak to her? The sources she has have strong bias; her controlling, religious and proud mother who sees everything through an extremely filtered lense, her justifiably bitter half-brother, and aunts and cousins who have already suffered enough during the decades they were left behind in China. The cards are not in her favor, but that will not deter her. She knows it is what her father intended for her to do. It is why he gave her the very unusual name Chinese name Yeh Wah at birth. It means Remember China. She must return to Asia to learn the truth about the betrayal that altered the course of her father’s, and subsequently, two generations of his family’s lives.