The Hidden Life of Eddie Kitchens

Edwina Kitchens, the beloved mother of her church for nearly 50 years, dies. In her early years she was affectionately known by friends and family as "Eddie." After the funeral her teenage granddaughter finds an old trunk in her attic, and tells her mother about it. Her mother is the old lady's oldest daughter, who doesn't believe her eyes when she goes through all the photos, letters, and photography equipment in the trunk, especially all the torrid love letters from China. She wonders how the beautiful young woman in the photos could have been her quiet, meek, religious mother. Digging deeper into the trunk, she comes upon some letters that strongly suggest that the Chinese man who authored the love letters was possibly her real father. "Am I half-Chinese?" she gasped, horrified that possibly her religious mother's life had been a gigantic hoax, and that she herself was living a lie. No one in the family knew that when a young woman this saintly old lady from a small Iowa town had gone to New York City as a photojournalist in the 1930s and taken Harlem by storm. They didn't know that when abroad she photographed and interviewed famous people like Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. While in China covering the Sino-Japanese War, she reported on the awful massacre in Nanking, and her amazing photos shocked the world. China was where she met and fell in love with a handsome Chinese Communist military officer, and became pregnant by him. This is a story about the search for identity by the daughter, and the surprising life her mother had lived as a young reporter in Asia just before the Second World War.