A bitter and sweet family history

Back in 2017, a phone call from an old friend of her mother's left Chen Xiaowen questioning everything she thought she knew about her life. The caller told her that the man she had grown up with and called "father" her whole life was not, in fact, her biological father. It was a secret Chen's grandmother had confided decades earlier, entrusting the friend to pass it on at a suitable moment.

By the time Chen learned the truth, her parents and grandparents had all passed away. Some relatives said they had heard whispers of the situation, but no one knew exactly who her biological father was.

Over the following year, Chen tried every means possible to find her biological father, eventually uncovering a long-buried story from the past. Along the way, she also embarked on a journey to understand her family's history.

That journey ultimately took shape as her new book, Grandma's Bitter Tea, a nonfiction work chronicling her family's history and the life experiences of older generations of her family. It has received a rating of 8.6 points out of 10 on China's popular review site Douban.

It is the first book by the 68-year-old, who was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, in 1958, and has worked as a teacher and a reporter, and now works as a merchant.

Chen says that she began to record the stories of her family members eight years ago. After repeated revisions, she chose some of these tales, along with the latest story of her search for her biological father, to write about her family's history.

In the book, Chen traces her grandmother Chen Huizhen's life story. Born into a wealthy family that ran a large drugstore in today's Fuzhou, Fujian province, she married the son of another rich family. After giving birth to five children, she divorced her husband when he fell in love with another woman, becoming an outlier in an era when women seldom initiated a divorce. She left with her youngest daughter Chen Fangling — who would become Chen Xiaowen's mother — and raised her largely on her own.

The price was heavy: she left behind four sons. Two died young, and the remaining two blamed her for the rest of their lives, convinced that her divorce had brought shame on the family and that she had chosen one child over the others.