This is an “East meets West” story, portraying the unconventional love of a Chinese civil rights activist and an American avant-garde artist. Hu Shi and Edith Clifford Williams met in 1914 when he was studying at Cornell University and she, a member of Alfred Stieglitz’s inner circle of cognoscenti, was producing ground-breaking works in abstract art. She helped him reconcile his self-image as an independent thinker with his acquiescence to a prearranged marriage. Sustained by her unflinching honesty, Hu advocated John Dewey’s pragmatism in solving China myriad problems. After the Communists took over, he was vilified and his son was driven to suicide, but the pragmatic approach has since gained acceptance in his homeland. The poignant story of how the two persevered through cultural and political dislocations, and how they sorted out problems arising from Hu’s relationships with various women, provides the readers with a single but varied and colorful strand to follow the history of modern China.