« Aiyi is Canning's 77-year old aunt with a piercing voice who lives in Toishan in China. Her home is a 3-three story, big brick house made by her family. She has one son, two grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. According the Jing-Mei, Aiyi looks ancient, shrunken, like a mummified relic. She is very small with thin white hair and brown decaying teeth.
« Wang Fuchi was Suyuan's first husband as well as the father of the twins. He was a Chinese soldier stationed in ChungKing during the war in 1944. He was killed two weeks before Suyuan had arrived in ChungKing.
« Mei Ching, and old peasant woman, had been the person to find the abandoned twins. She lived in a hidden stone cave, like thousands of people during the war, with her husband Mei Han. Every few days the Meis would forage for food supplies and that is how Mei Ching discovered Chwun Lu and Chwun Hwa. The Meis were Muslim and believed that twin babies were a sign of double luck.
« Once in the United States Suyuan wrote to one of her Shanghai schoolmates back in China. She asked the woman to help find her twin daughters. Her schoolmate wrote back telling Suyuan it was impossible to find children who were lost during the war. Many years later, while shopping, the schoolmate was drawn to two identical women because they resembled her old friend Suyuan. She shouted their names but they didn't acknowledge the names because Mei Ching has changed their names. The schoolmate confronted the twins and asked if they were Chwan Yu and Chwan Hwa, and they became excited because they remembered reading those names on the back of a picture which Suyuan had left with them before she abandoned them.
5. In 1944 the Japanese invaded and took over Kweilin during the war. As a young mother and wife, Suyuan fled on foot from her home in Kweilin with her twin infants and headed toward ChungKing where her husband was stationed as a soldier.
