Welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of July.

I am thrilled to be here with Vanessa Hua, who is the author of the book we are going to talk about.

It is a novel called Forbidden City.

Hi, Vanessa.

Hi. Thanks so much for having me on, Emily. I'm so glad you're here. I'm going to start by gushing a little bit. I'm a total fan girl of yours. You wrote a book called A River of Stars a few years ago that I thought was fabulous, and that made me really excited to read this very intriguing novel. So I wanted to start, just to lay the groundwork just a little bit for listeners. The main character's name is May. She is a Chinese teenager from the country in China.

And she goes on a journey because she is recruited by the Communist Party to join a dance

troop of girls who perform and really serve the male elite of the Communist Party.

The people who the girls are interacting with include

Chairman Mao. And so it is really the relationship between May and Chairman Mao that is the

focus and spine of the book. She gets caught up in a lot of palace intrigue and then in the

tumult and violence of the beginning of the cultural revolution. And so we see

both Mao and these seismic events in Chinese history through her eyes. So Vanessa, I understand from

your author's note that a photograph helped inspire this book. Can you tell us a little bit about it and why it caught your interest?

And in fact, I happen to have a copy handy about, listeners can't see, but about a decade

and a half ago, I was watching a documentary of China. And up pops this black and white photo

of Chairman Mao surrounded by giggling teenage girls.

And some of them are dressed in plaid. They almost remind me of Bobby Soxers. And that's when I

learned that Mao was a fan of ballroom dancing. And in fact, there was an American journalist,

Agnes Smedley in 1937 when she traveled to the Rebel Stronghold to cover them, she taught them Foxrot, square dancing. And in the decades that followed, he had these cultural work troops, as they were called.

And these young women would partner with him on the bedroom and on the dance floor.

You have this amazing bit in your author's note in which you say that you were looking for

information about this dance troupe and Chairman Mao's interactions with them.

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