In Firewife: A Story of Fire and Water (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2007), Tinling Choong draws on the ancient Chinese creation legend of Nuwa and the battle between fire and water to give a modern story of how women are connected throughout time. Anchee Min‘s new book, The Last Empress (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), continues the story of Tzu Hsi, or Empress Orchid, offering an extensively researched, highly revisionist portrait of a critical female figure in modern Chinese history.

Tinling Choong was born and raised in Malaysia. She received a B.A. from Wellesley College, is working toward her Ph.D. In East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University and she is at work on a novel. She lives in Vermont.

Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. At seventeen she was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao’s Shanghai Film Studio recruited her to work as a movie actress. Her critically acclaimed memoir, Red Azalea, recounts her experience during the Cultural Revolution, a period she revists in fictional form in her national bestselling Becoming Madame Mao. With the internationally bestselling novel Empress Orchid, Min continued her project of offering extensively researched, highly revisionist accounts of critical female figures in modern Chinese history. Min’s new book, The Last Empress, continues this masterful revisionist work.