Chasing Hepburn by Gus Lee (Harmony Books, Random House)

There are some books that are meant to be inhabited, read again and again over the years in order to live a certain kind of life that can be found only in their pages.  They defy being placed in a cage of words built by a review. They range too wide, are too rich, and are so vivid that they take up residence in the personal world of their readers. 

This is the sort of book that Chasing Hepburn is, the story of a vanished China, a family history, and a love letter to a woman who was as indomitable as she appeared to be fragile. Gus Lee knew his mother for only a short time in his life. He’s made up for that loss by mining every memory of her that he could find, to build a portrait of her that is impossible to turn away from, or to forget.

Da-tsien was a brilliant beauty with big feet, a legacy from her father who refused to let them be bound into stubs. Her mother saw this as a barrier to her daughter’s successful marriage in the future but without her father’s interference, Da-tsien would never have saved her family during the turmoil and danger of wartime China. It’s possible she never would have realized her greatest dream--to have a son. 

“She was a dreamer who fell in love with a rogue,” Lee says, and throughout Chasing Hepburn, it’s clear where his sympathies lie. He loves the girl who escapes from her chaperone to ride on the back of a wild boy’s motorcycle in Shanghai of the 1920’s, who chooses someone who’s friends with both a son of the powerful Soong family and one of the city’s leading gangsters, and who marries him in spite of objections from family--both his and hers. Zee Zee and Da-tsien are bound together for life, although she is forced to share him with his other passions--flying planes in warfare and his obsession with the American actress, Katharine Hepburn, whom Da-tsien also admires. 

Their marriage is more like a tempestuous love affair, marked by separations dictated by the history of their time. Zee Zee is a restless warrior fighting against the Communist forces that Chiang Kai-shek battles, Da-tsien has become a woman whose flair for adventure is temporarily quenched by giving birth to daughters while she yearns for a son.  Her inner flame is never extinguished by maternity; it lies dormant until Shanghai is invaded by the Japanese and Da-tsien, alone, sets off with her daughters on an odyssey across war-time China to reach her husband who has been sent to America.

On her over-sized feet, with her unflagging courage, she brings her children to safety and to her husband who has in his absence gone to Hollywood as a Chinese war hero. Feted and praised, he has realized a dream. He has met and fallen in unrequited love with Katharine Hepburn while his wife and children journey through war and peril to reach him. 

This is not Da-tsien’s happy ending. This comes later, when she finally gives birth to the son who will bring her and her story to the world of readers.

Although Lee gives short shrift to his father, Zee Zee becomes almost as irresistible as Da-tsien, even when he turns into a domestic tyrant in the family’s American home. Falling in love with Amy Tan’s legendary mother , Daisy, long after Da-tsien’s death, the two of them travel together to China where they’re forced to pretend they’re married in order to sleep in the same bed. “We do things ” Daisy tells her daughter, “that you haven’t even heard of.” But it is the spirit of Da-tsien that Zee Zee  welcomes to his bedside as he lies dying at the age of ninety-one and it is Zee Zee who gives his son the stories of Da-tsien as a rebellious girl and a woman who loved a difficult man with all of her fierce heart.

Lee has the incomparable gift of interlacing China’s history with the love story of his parents, making Chou Enlai, T.V. Soong, and Shanghai’s notorious member of the Green Gang, Pan-da come alive on the page, evoking admiration and sorrow. Chasing Hepburn is a book that can easily become an addiction of the best kind.~Janet Brown