“Forbidden City,” by Bay Area author Vanessa Hua, tells the story of a teenage girl who escapes a life of drudgery in the provinces of China when she joins a ballroom dancing troupe that entertains Chairman Mao — and eventually becomes his lover.
“Forbidden City” by Bay Area author Vanessa Hua is the first book she ever wrote — now published 13 years later. “I believe that fiction can really flourish where the official record ends,” says Vanessa Hua, whose ambitious new novel, “Forbidden City,” tells the story of a teenage girl who escapes a life of drudgery in the provinces of China when she joins a ballroom dancing troupe that entertains Chairman Mao.
Researching the new book, Hua found out that Mao “was a fan of ballroom dancing. … The Chairman’s personal physician wrote a memoir saying, ‘Oh, for these women, it was the highest honor of their lives.’” Hua’s fictionalized heroine, Mei Xiang, strikes a compelling figure as she navigates the machinations of Mao’s understandably displeased spouse and even helps launch the Cultural Revolution. As she witnesses the violence wrecking those accused of being too bourgeois, she ultimately takes a public anti-Mao stance that forces her on the run.
The quietly unstoppable author somehow manages to balance her fiction with her journalistic duties — she’s a columnist and former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. She left her day gig in 2007 to enroll in UC Riverside’s MFA creative writing program. But the creative urge struck long before grad school. “I’d been writing stories since I was a kid,” she recalls. “Even during my time at the Chronicle, I remember printing out my stories and running to the printer to grab them.
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