Chai, May-lee & Chai, Winberg. The girl from Purple Mountain; love, honor, war, and one family's journey from China to America.

St. Martin's, Griffin. 306p. illus. c2001. 0-312-30270-3. $14.95 SA*

Winberg Chai was born in Shanghai in 1932 when his American-educated parents returned to China for his birth. May-lee Chai, his American-born daughter, grew up in the U.S. not knowing or understanding her father's story. Together, but in separate voices, they retell the sage of Winberg's parents, Ruth and Charles Chai, and how they struggled, first to be educated in a China opening to the West and then to survive in a China torn by invasion and civil war.

Purple Mountain, a pine-filled park on the city limits of Nanjing, China, was the favorite recreation spot of university students and, in 1920 Ruth Chai was one of the first eight woman admitted to China's National Central University in Nanjing. Ruth, who had chosen her Christian name with much care, went on to study in the U.S., married there, and returned to China not realizing the turmoil that had overtaken her country by the mid-thirties.

The Girl from Purple Mountain tells the story of how this family, the parents and their three children, survived both the Japanese invasion and the political turmoil that engulfed China after WW II, fleeing finally to Taiwan and then to the States. What makes the tale absorbing is the duet of voices, the now elderly Winberg who in many ways does not want to remember his childhood, and the young American May-Lee who has a lifetime's worth of questions about her family's story. This memoir is haunting both in the sadness of its story and the dynamism of its individuals. Patricia A. Moore, Brookline, MA