STRANGERS OF THE SAME ROOT

Four branches. Four passports. One family name broken by history. In 1949, three brothers and a cousin from a Guangdong Hakka family are scattered across Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. One stays behind with the key to an ancestral house. One carries the family genealogy across the Taiwan Strait. One pawns a silver bracelet in colonial Hong Kong. One remakes the family name in Nanyang. Decades later, their descendants arrive at the same North American university dormitory, each bearing a different passport and a different version of what it means to be Chinese. Sharon, Wendy, Rebecca, and Grace do not know that they share the same root—or that the objects inherited from their families are pieces of the same broken story. Moving from 1949 to the present, Strangers of the Same Root is a multigenerational literary saga about migration, language, memory, and the price of survival. Across Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, and the United States, it asks: when history changes our names, our borders, and even the words we use for home, what remains of family? For readers drawn to sweeping family epics, Asian diaspora fiction, and novels of identity and belonging.