When Sleeping Women Wake

 When Sleeping Women Wake, the debut novel by Emma Pei Yin, is a historical fiction novel that is significantly different than most that I have read. It covers that 3 ½ year period during WWII during which the Japanese military occupied Hong Kong. It’s a story mostly about women who are attempting to deal with the cultural values of the Japanese and the Chinese that devalues women. In the face of hardship of war and the brutality of the Japanese, the Chinese misogyny seemed to have sufficient flexibility after all. The Japanese perspective was women were to be seen but not heard, that women had nothing to contribute intellectually or militarily beyond providing “comfort” to the male warriors. Chinese women were expected by the Japanese to bow to their expectations.

 Mingzhu was the mother of a successful Hong Kong businessman. Qiang was their daughter, and Biyu was their maid. Biyu was hired specifically to attend to Qiang shortly after her birth, and a deep affection developed between them, much more like sisters than anything else. In the occupation, Mingzhu’s husband was killed, so the women were mostly left to fend for themselves. Ms. Yin detailed their interaction with the forces in Hong Kong that resisted the Japanese aggression and the many brutal deaths with which they had to manage. It was the war that led to the women being painfully separated from one another, and in turn, how they managed their challenges individually and heroically. 

 

The characters and plot were all skillfully developed. Just as the author talked of the love that the women had for each other, she also told of their attempts to find love of a more classical nature. I thought the author brought the various themes together when she completed the sentence which started with the title of the book: “When sleeping women wake, mountains move.” If historical fiction is of interest to you, especially the war in the Pacific, and especially with parts of the populace that was impacted by the war you may not have previously considered, then this book is for you. It gets my strong recommendation.