In the Jewish family, Yu Lihua was told that he could stay in their house, with free room and board, but he had to do some housework for them and take the school bus to school every day. The implication is that she has become his maid. The weekend is her busiest day. After cleaning seven rooms, two bathrooms and a kitchen, she will also remove weeds in the yard, arrange flower beds, scrape off fallen leaves and so on. At this time, the owner of the house, the Jewish couple, is the happiest. They go out to eat, then play poker with friends, or participate in other entertainment activities ... At night, the whistling wind, the sound of rain falling leaves, the cry of unknown beasts, the phone suddenly rings in silence; What's more, it is invisible and intangible, but it is tightly wrapped in her homesick thoughts.

After living in a Jewish home for two months, the host saw Lihua secretly crying several times, telling her that there was a college of agriculture of the University of California nearby and two students from China could have sex. So, one Sunday, after Li Hua finished her housework, her master drove her to meet the two China students. Seeing the faces of China people again and speaking Chinese, Yu Lihua was so excited that he wanted to cry. Two China students in Agricultural College are very friendly and actively plan to help her transfer to a better school in Los Angeles. But when she showed the Jewish couple the admission permit for the new school, their faces were like the gloomy sky before the summer storm warning, and they all cursed the girl who didn't need to spend a penny as an ungrateful person. She is speechless, not because she has nothing to say, but because she can't fully express her anger in English. The night before she left, she found the Jewish woman sneaking into her room and opening her luggage for inspection. Yu Lihua finally unbearable, sat up and asked her loudly. The woman casually replied, "I don't believe you from China. I want to see if you have taken anything from my house? " Yu Lihua shouted, "Did I take it?" The woman shrugged her shoulders, closed the door and walked away.

In Los Angeles, she was employed by a divorced woman in her thirties. This woman has a six or seven-year-old girl to take care of. Yu Lihua goes to school during the day, plays with the little girl in the afternoon, greets the little girl to sleep at night, and reads books and tells stories before going to bed. After the little girl went to bed, she stayed alone in a big room with twelve rooms to review her lessons. The loneliness of homesickness often squeezes out the necessary peace when she studies. Many nights, facing the lights and ghostly trees outside the window, she sighed and asked, "colorful America, why should I stay in this cold room?"

She continued to be employed, first, second and third, and she was fed up with the pain of relying on others. After a semester, due to her excellent academic performance, she was exempted from tuition and got a scholarship. From then on, she moved into the girls' dormitory and had her own sky. In the new school, Yu Lihua studied journalism. There is a Japanese female classmate whose English is very good. She won the second MGM Award for an English novel. Oriental girls look down on her and often start to revise manuscripts. Yu Lihua, a strong man, is determined to run for MGM Literary Creation Award. The so-called MGM literary creation award was set up by the boss of MGM in Hollywood to promote young writers in this school, and all students in the school can participate in the election. Yu Lihua wrote a short story in private, describing a girl who went from Hankou to Chongqing to find her father who had run away from home. By applying as a maid, the girl entered her father's house and another wife's house in the suburbs of Chongqing, slowly letting her father know her true identity and being further moved. When her father followed her back to Hankou, her mother was already heartbroken. This novel, titled "There are many sorrows at the head of the Yangtze River", won the MGM Literature Award of 1956, which made many foreign opponents stunned. The name Yu Lihua attracted the attention of overseas literary and art circles for the first time.

Grasping the psychology of the times, he successfully created the artistic image of China people studying in the United States. From 65438 to 0960, Yu Lihua deliberately pursued his childhood hometown in eastern Zhejiang, and wrote his first novel Dream Back to Qinghe, which exposed the persecution of women by old-fashioned families in China. This novel was first serialized in Crown Magazine in Taiwan Province Province, published in 1963, and then reprinted six times. Not only was it serialized by radio stations in Taiwan Province Province, but it was also purchased by Shaw Company for the right to film production. Its popularity shows her success, which has undoubtedly become a great force and strengthened Lihua's confidence in continuous climbing. Nie Hualing, a famous Chinese-American woman writer, once met Yu Lihua, who returned from the United States for a temporary stay, in an ice shop in Taipei, and expressed her views on Dream Back to Qinghe: "I especially like Amro's description after being beaten by ABBA, which describes a conservative woman's sad mood and her tolerance for fate just right. I was very touched when I saw it. " After listening to Nie Hualing's advice, Yu Lihua was too excited to know what to do. He put his fist on the table for a while, covered his face for a while, and tried to reach out and hold Nie Hualing's hand for a while, repeatedly saying, "That's very kind of you! What you said is absolutely right. If a writer wants to impress his readers, he must first impress himself. You know, I wrote about Eminem in tears. It was written in tears! Crying while writing, no way! " Nie Hualing was also moved by her enthusiasm for writing with herself and couldn't say a word.

The success of Dream Back to Qinghe made her works come out one after another. The collection of short stories "Return" 1963 was published by Taiwan Province Wenxing Publishing House, which reflected the life and mentality of students studying in the United States in Taiwan Province Province in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Secondly, the novella Autumn (1964 Satellite Publishing House) describes the family tragedy of China students studying at Princeton University. Later, there were novels Change (1965 Satellite Publishing House) and See Palm again (1967 Taipei Crown Publishing House; Fujian People's Publishing House (1980), Exam (1974 Taiwan Province Publishing House), Fu's Children (1978 Hong Kong Tiandi Book Publishing House), Short Story Collection Star in the Snow (1966 Crown Publishing House) and White Horse Collection. 198 1 year, Hong Kong Tiandi Book Publishing House edited his works and published fourteen volumes of Collected Works of Li Hua. Apart from the impression of returning to China, these works show all kinds of China students studying in the United States or Chinese families living in the United States from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. The success or failure of the career, the quality of marriage, the adaptation to foreign life, the nostalgia for the homeland, and the arrangements for the next generation. Because she first began to write about the specific theme of students studying in the United States in Taiwan Province Province, her works are numerous, precise and influential, so she is known as "the originator of novels for overseas students in the past twenty years".

Seeing Palm and Palm is the most successful and representative work by Yu Lihua about China students studying in the United States. Written in 1966, she came to the United States for thirteen years, published the following year, and won the best novel award in Taiwan Province Province. Xia Zhiqing, a professor at Columbia University, said: "This love story, which is not too warm but fully symbolizes the depression of the times, is the evidence that Yu Lihua's novel art has reached a new stage." The novel successfully created the images of Mou, Yi Shan and Qiu Shangfeng, especially Mou. Before going to America, he was full of vigor, stubbornness and a little wild; But ten years later, he was a different person. His aging and premature aging mainly come from the painful life of international students who dominate the world in the United States. With an empty heart, he returned to Taiwan Province Province to seek comfort and sustenance. Seeing the deep-rooted palm trees, he suddenly realized that he was a "rootless generation", which was the total source of loneliness and distress.

The distress of the "rootless generation" is caused by the specific political situation in China and the long-term division between Taiwan Province Province and the mainland. Yu Lihua's main achievement and contribution lies in her keen and timely grasp of the psychology of the times and her success in shaping the artistic image of Mou. Seeing the Palm and Seeing the Palm, which has been serialized for three months in the People's Edition of Taiwan Province Credit Information Daily, is regarded as the most touching and influential work for readers by critics in Taiwan Province Province and Hongkong, and seeks to become a portrayal of readers themselves. Over the years, Yu Lihua has maintained a strong creative momentum. Nearly seventy years old, she wrote another novel "Between Parting and Farewell", which once again aroused strong repercussions overseas and was known as the North American version of Fortress Besieged.