Linda Jaivin, one of the most prolific writers I’ve ever met, is a bubbly, charming Australian who’s been involved with China for thirty years. During the Suzhou Bookworm Literary Festival held during the first two weeks of March she introduced her two latest books, The Monkey and the Dragon, and An Immoral Woman. The Monkey and the Dragon is about her close friend Hou Dejian, and her own life in Taiwan in the 1980s, when paranoia and intrigue were thick in the air on the island nation. Hou Dejian was a legend in his own time in the late seventies and early eighties when he penned and sang the song “Descendants of the Dragon,” which became an anthem of sorts for young Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Mainland. Hou also created a stir in 1986 when he defected from Taiwan to Communist China, more out of curiosity and ignorance, as far as I could tell, than for any reasons of idelogy. The Taiwanese government subequently barred Linda from entering the country, believing she facilitated the high profile defection. She did not, which the Kuomintang government eventually understood and accepted when the Mainland government kicked Hou out of China just after the Tiananmen incident.

An Immoral Woman sounds even more intriguing to me: an historical novel set in the early twentieth century, built on the lives of two extraordinary personalities against one of the most dramatic backdrops in modern history: the end of the Qing dynasty and the subsequent battles between warlords for domination of the country. George Morrison was a larger-than-life journalist for the Times of London, based in Beijing, who loved two things: boasting and seducing women. The woman who turned the tables on him most successfully was Mae Perkins, a young American heiress given to nymphomania. China, revolution, sex? What more can a sinophile ask for in a book?