Virgin Widows

__Virgin Widows__ is a poignant and disquieting novel that unfolds the stories of two women whose lives, despite being separated by nearly a century, reveal a disturbing similarity. First published in China in 1985, it appears now in English for the first time.

"I learned who I was… at Kamehameha."

In 1944, J. Arthur Rath, a part-Hawaiian boy from a broken home, entered the Kamehameha School for Boys as an eighth-grade boarder. Thus began Rath's love affair with an institution that he credits with turning his life around, with giving him and other disadvantaged children of native ancestry - Hawai‘i's "lost generations" - the confidence and support necessary to make something of themselves. This is the story of that love affair. It is also the story of Rath's recent battle, together with other alumni, for the integrity of his beloved Kamehameha against the school's trustees and their organization, the powerful Bishop Estate.

In a lively talk-story manner, Rath reminisces about campus life and his classmates, many of whom became lifelong friends and influential members of the Hawaiian community. Years later Rath, a successful retired businessman, would call on these same friends to hold Kamehameha's trustees accountable for their mismanagement of Bishop Estate's vast financial holdings and ultimately their failure to carry out founder Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop's mandate to educate Hawaiian children. Rath draws on his many personal ties to the school and the estate to provide surprising revelations on the trustees and the "Bishop Estate Scandal," which made headlines daily throughout the mid-1990s.

Things just keep getting better and better. ... Well, don't they? If you are a woman and you live in China, to answer this question you will need not only to look around you but to look back, to see not just how things are now but how they once were. China has traveled a long and torturous road since the collapse of the final imperial dynasty and the establishment of a modern republic early in this century; but have the nature of women's lives and their opportunities for just and equal treatment improved? Renowned writer Gu Hua confronts this issue in Virgin Widows, a poignant and disquieting novel that unfolds in alternating chapters the stories of two women whose lives, despite being separated by nearly a century, reveal a disturbing similarity. First published in China in 1985, it appears now in English for the first time 1 2 1983 3 The reign of the great Qing emperor Guangxu. Once again Love Goose Shoals at the base of Celestial Peak. 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 The year, 1908. The great Qing emperor Guangxu has died. Pu Yi, three-year-old heir to the throne, is carried into the throne room to be coronated as the last emperor of a line that has run continuously for more than two thousand years. 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Translator’s Postscript