E.L. Shen's 'Foreigners' Traces a Family Lie Back to a Beheaded Viceroy

By Elena Vasquez

E.L. Shen's debut novel Foreigners — published by Quill Tree Books, an imprint of HarperCollins — traces one lie told by a 19th-century Chinese viceroy across four generations of family reinvention.

What is the book about?

The novel runs three timelines. In 1965, Zheng Yi emigrates from Taiwan to America. She renames herself Audrey. In the present day, her granddaughter Dawn attends an elite boarding school. She battles severe imposter syndrome. A third strand follows Duanfang, Shen's great-great-great grandfather and a Manchu Dynasty viceroy.

Dawn's year-long history project links the timelines. It exposes Yi's decades of fabrications about the family's past.

Who was Duanfang?

Duanfang served as a viceroy in late-1800s China. He founded China's first kindergarten. He traveled to America to meet diplomats. He campaigned against foot binding. He amassed Chinese bronzes.

His bronze altar set sits today at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Asian Art wing. Shen first saw her ancestor's work there as a child, led by her grandmother.

One fact undid her inherited narrative. "He actually wasn't Manchu," her Chinese history professor told her. "He was biologically Han Chinese, and had only pretended to be Manchu to rise in power during the Manchu Dynasty."

University of Rochester Professor Elya Zhang answered Shen's cold email. She called Duanfang her first "academic love." Zhang described him as charismatic and charming around others, yet introverted and detail-oriented when alone, with each move meticulously documented in his journals.

The takeaway: a single identity switch — Manchu on paper, Han by blood — became the engine of the debut.

Why did his own army kill him?

The Xinhai Revolution pulled Duanfang out of retirement. Han soldiers had rebelled against their Manchu rulers. Duanfang rejoined public life. His own Han army mutinied against him. He revealed his ethnicity, pleading for his life. The soldiers did not believe him. They beheaded him anyway.

The army presented his severed head to his family. The family became destitute after his death, Shen learned from her professor.

"If he had stayed in retirement, if he had bided his time, he would have lived," Zhang told Shen. Some Manchu colleagues kept their posts afterward. Others rose higher than Duanfang ever did.

What does the novel argue?

Shen reads Duanfang's biography as a modern question about identity. "I was struck by Duanfang's clear flaws and the dire and long-term consequences of his great yet dangerous ambition," she wrote. She also called herself "a shape-shifter — and sometimes even an imposter" in daily life.

The novel maps ambition onto three protagonists across a century of family history, with one lying grandmother, one identity-switching viceroy, and one watching student. Duanfang switches ethnicity. Yi switches names. Dawn switches nothing — she only uncovers. The book asks which performances count as survival, and which become the inherited shame of the next generation.

Shen closes by writing that her ancestor "is a complicated, flawed member of my family; he is simply a man."

The takeaway: Foreigners frames one family's history of ethnic passing as the long cost of performed identity.