The crippled tree

Blurb

The Crippled Tree is a history and biography by Han Suyin. It covers the years 1885 to 1928, beginning with the life of her father, a Belgium-educated Chinese engineer of Hakka heritage, from a family of minor gentry in Sichuan. It describes how he met and married her mother, a Flemish Belgian, his return to China and her own birth and early life..
A man's life begins with his ancestors and is continued in his descendants. My father's life, and after my father my own life, begins with the Family. To describe the Family I must go back into time past and tell how the progenitors came to the land where they settled. For they were Hakkas, the Guest People, wanderers within the continent that is China.
She goes on to describe how her family's ancestors had fled from the Mongol invasion of North China, and became gentry in Sechuan, the 'land of the four rivers'. How they were involved in putting down a revolt by the Hui people, Chinese Muslims who rebelled in sympathy with the great Taiping Rebellion of the mid-19th century.
She follows her father's life as he goes to Shanghai and then to Belgium to be trained as an engineer. How he "became enchanted with Western Science"