Fan Wu’s latest historical fiction chronicles the often-ignored hardships experienced by Chinese laborers sent to Europe during WWI
China’s Qingming festival (sometimes called Tomb-Sweeping Day) is little known in most of the West. But the people of Noyelles-sur-Mer, a quaint town of 700 people in northern France, are well acquainted with it. They have held ceremonies for the festival each year since 2002 to acknowledge a once-forgotten group of people laid to rest in their town’s cemetery: 841 Chinese laborers who died in Europe during the First World War.