'Letters in the Jade Dragon Box' explores family, faith

Fifteen-year-old Chen Wen-shan has very fleeting memories from before she came to live with and her great uncle Zhao Tai-lu when she was 5 years old.

When they receive a wooden box with a dragon engraved in jade that was smuggled out of China in the mid-1970s, it holds letters from her mother and artwork from her grandfather, Zhao’s brother.

“Letters in the Jade Dragon Box” (Deseret Book, $24.99), a recently released historical novel by Gale Sears, explores how Wen-shan and her great uncle learn about the fate of their family members through these letters that were written before Wen-shan was born and when she was a baby during the communist reign of Mao Zedong in China.

Woven throughout the story is the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Hong Kong as Zhai Tai-lu recounts his conversion and experiences with other Mormons.

"We’re all one family," Sears said. "We care about our families. We care about those ties we have with our ancestors. That's just a human experience we all share with each other."

Sears was interested in the juxtaposition of the gospel of Jesus Christ with forms of government and forms of ideology that created a natural tension.

"It’s looking at what people went through and how they suffered and what happened to them," the author said. "I like to bring in the peace the gospel can bring and that set side by side."

In “The Silence of God,” which was released last year, Sears followed the Lindlof family, who were some of the only Mormons in early 20th-century Russia as the country went from the rule of Imperial Russia, through the Bolshevik Revolution and then settled into communism.

“You have a system of government that ripped God out of the lives of the people. That was very powerful for me,” Sears said. The members of the Lindlof family were either deported or sent to work camps.

That communist ideal found its way east to China, where the people weren't Christian, but did "have a good mode of life surrounding the family," Sears said.

“Letters in the Jade Dragon Box” opens with Mao’s death in 1976 in Hong Kong and people who were celebrating his death.

Hong Kong was under British control until 1997 when control was handed back to the People’s Republic of China. There is currently an LDS temple in Hong Kong and full-time missionaries proselyte there. The church is not allowed to do missionary work in China outside of Hong Kong and Macau.