Anger. Love. Shame. Desire. Betrayal. These are just a few of the emotions that burn within the women in Their Divine Fires, the debut novel by Wendy Chen ’14. Spanning four generations in one Chinese family, the story begins in 1917 China with Yunhong, whose older brothers join the nascent Communist party. After Yunhong marries, her brother destroys her happiness in his quest to reshape the nation. The second section follows twin sisters Yonghong and Hongxing, Yunhong’s granddaughters, during the Cultural Revolution. Yonghong blazes with patriotic fervor while Hongxing ignites nationalism by singing and dancing in the army. The third part takes readers to the United States in 2004, where Emily, Yunhong’s great-granddaughter, probes the secrets that both bind and divide her family. The book concludes in 2018, when the truths Emily uncovers force the women to re-examine their history, their choices, and what they mean to each other.

This is no sweeping saga, but a careful selection of tightly written slices of life told from the perspectives of the four main characters. The jumps in time and location reflect the experiences of the displaced, the disenfranchised, and the Chinese diaspora. Relationships are strained, communication is broken, and there is much to grieve. The women fall in love and suffer heartbreak. “… [Hongxing] could never have imagined what it felt like to be denied love. Like a ghost, hungry and full of desire.” Not only do they feel like hungry ghosts, but their lost loves continue to haunt them.

Chen shares just enough about the political and cultural conflicts during each time period as to vividly render their impact upon girls and women. She draws chilling parallels between the social unrest in Mao-era China and MAGA-era U.S. “The newscasters were always going on and on about the collapse of American democracy. But it wasn’t so different, Hongxing thought, from her childhood. They had worn red then, too, had held red books in their hands. They had placed their fists over their hearts, beating red.”

Chen’s prose is both lyrical and unflinching, with layers of subtext that convey cultural beliefs and evoke Chinese folktales. Yunhong tells her daughter, “Girls live as discarded things. By morning, the bundle would have disappeared, carried away in the mouth of a striped thing to be raised as a tiger. That is the only way girls can survive.” The women approach life with a certain, steely ferocity, each trying to escape their history and deny their past. Yunhong says, “The stars had determined Yuexin’s fate, but the stars, too, were in constant motion, filling the universe with their divine fires.” Perhaps, fueled by their own internal fires, women can not simply persist, but can change their fates.