Sun and Moon

Peking, 1910. In a garden estate where peonies bloom and koi glide through lily ponds, two children move between worlds. Nancy and Edward Herrick are Eurasian: their father Timothy is English, their mother Chinese. They speak Mandarin with their amah and English with their father, and belong fully to neither world. Around them, the old China teeters toward revolution while inside the household, whispered tensions simmer between the children's two cultures and their Chinese half-siblings. Their father fights to maintain his identity amid the chaos of raising mixed-race children in a society that has no easy place for them. This is a novel about the particular loneliness of being caught between civilizations, about the innocence of childhood that cannot last, and the question every mixed-child must face: where does one end and the other begin? Written in 1927, when such stories were almost never told, Sun and Moon offers an intimate portrait of a family navigating the last gasps of imperial China through the vulnerable eyes of its children.