Da Chen

Da Chen was a Chinese American author whose memoirs and novels drew heavily on his experiences of political persecution, poverty and education during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Born in rural Fujian in 1962, he came from a family targeted because his grandfather had been a landowner, and his disrupted childhood later became the subject of Colors of the Mountain, its young-reader adaptation China’s Son, and the sequel Sounds of the River. After studying at Beijing Languages and Culture University, Chen moved to the United States, attended Columbia Law School on a full scholarship and worked in investment banking before writing full time. Colors of the Mountain became a New York Times bestseller. Chen died in 2019.

Chen’s most substantial historical novel is Brothers, a family saga following two half-brothers raised in radically different circumstances as China passes through the Cultural Revolution and the political and economic changes that follow. My Last Empress moves further into the past, placing an American traveller’s obsessive love story within the upheavals of nineteenth-century imperial China. His younger-reader books include Girl Under a Red Moon, based on his family’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution, while Wandering Warrior and Sword combine Chinese settings with martial-arts fantasy. Chen is therefore especially relevant to readers interested in Maoist China, the Cultural Revolution, social division, migration and the encounter between Chinese and Western cultures.