Revolution rages in 20th-century China, a rusting container ship sails the world for two decades, and a tiny fairy is frustrated in a northern harbor town. "Trixi Pudong and the Greater World" is a family saga with a magical twist, spanning Shanghai's Golden Age to Hamburg, Germany, 2015. It is a tale of four generations of a Chinese family, torn between their deepest dreams and loyalties. Shanghai, 1938. The city is under Japanese occupation, civil war brews in China's interior. Edwin Kuo is eight years old, obsessed with the question "Why the difference?" between China and the Greater World, the world outside his country's borders. He ventures into the Greater World by working with the British Merchant Navy through WWII. In the 1960s, trapped behind the Chinese Communists' closed-door policies, he becomes a sea captain and sails on a decrepit container ship for twenty years with his sons, caught between the desire to defect from China and the hope of re-uniting with his wife and mother, missing since the Cultural Revolution. Edwin's aunt, Ahn Na, is a flamboyant socialite of 1940s Shanghai. She seeks diversion from her dull marriage through opium, nightclubs, and a mysterious red-haired Brit. Little Two is Edwin's younger son. At age 25 he has not stepped foot on land since he was a small child. He knows only the container ship and the sea but gives in to a burning curiosity one night, venturing onto foreign land, into a raucous German harbor town. In Hamburg 2015, the spirit of Ahn Na from Shanghai is now Tita Pasang, an overweight, anxiety-ridden fairy, working tirelessly to rescue her grand-niece - half-Chinese Trixi, the product of Little Two's brief land adventure - from a purposeless life of drug addiction. If only Trixi understood what it means to be her family's last hope...
About the Author: Audrey Mei was born in Northern California where she began playing cello at age 7. She later graduated from New England Conservatory with a BM in cello performance and from Tufts University with a BA biological psychology. In 1996 she was awarded a Fulbright Grant to study cello at Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland. Although her field of study was music, the Fulbright Committee in Helsinki was deeply impressed by her writing and greeted her with the question, "When will your first book appear?" Audrey would like to thank the Committee for their support and apologizes for the 20-year delay. Audrey moved to Berlin, Germany, in 2006 where she has been an active member of the English-language literary scene. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Gangway Literary Magazine and Glimmer Train, among others. She draws on her experiences living in the US, Europe, and Asia to write multicultural fiction, preferably with a touch of magic. To find out more about her current works in progress, visit her blog at gritlands.blogspot.com.