Unspoken Passions

About the Book

Same as the author's Chinese novels published respectively in California, China, and Taiwan, this English version tells about a Dr. Wang's rocky emotional life. He has been romantically involved with three women at different phases of life. His first adolescent love was an American girl, Cox, who was born in China. In his twenties he meets Dr. Wu, his second love. Both end abruptly against their will in pain because of politics. After barely surviving the cultural Revolution, he comes to America in the late 1970s. Here he meets a young nurse, Guan, from Hong Kong, but twenty years younger.

At ending of the story, Dr. Wang and these three women have a chance to meet at a party in Los Angeles. The unspoken passions between Wang and his former loves have persisted across the Pacific over the years. The people in the party that the 50-year-old bachelor will marry one of the three women. The reunion is bitter and sweet. It reflects Dr. Wang's miseries in his life, an epitome of China's modern history, like 'Dr. Zhivago' for the Russians. What we see here is a special slant on China's modern history that would lead to the current rapid rise, a reaction to its darkest age showcased by Dr. Wang's miseries.

But who will be Dr. Wang's bride?

Being a psychiatrist, the author uses knowledge of the subconscious to create the characters and dreams to enrich the expression in the novel. It is marked by a Chinese national psychiatric journal as "A living textbook in psychodynamics."

About the Author

Born in 1930 in China, Zhong Y. Liu, M.D. is a board certified psychiatrist in Southern California. Before coming to the United States in 1980, he attends all schools, from primary to medical, founded by Americans, including Yali Middle School and Xiangya Medical School in Hunan province established by the Yale-China Association head-quartered in New Haven, CT, at the turn of the last century. He participates in psychiatric residency at UCLA-Harbor Medical Center 1981-1985. At age of 76 still working part-time in a hospital, he is spending most of his time on literary writing in both English and Chinese.