Four Treasures Of The Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

 

Daiyu was put out on the streets by her grandmother as a young girl.  Her parents had been taken by the government and executed as traitors and the grandmother knew her granddaughter would be next.  She cuts Daiyu's hair and disguises her as a boy.  Daiyu lives on the street, begging food and work until she ends up at a calligraphy master's studio.  There she worked for him by day and learned the craft by night.  That comes to an end when Daiyu is kidnapped and taken to the United States where she is installed in a brothel.

The brothel is run by a tong and when Daiyu escapes with the help of a customer, she knows she must run far and quickly.  She goes back to her male disguise and goes by the name of Jacob Lee.  She ends up in Idaho and works in a Chinese grocery where she becomes part of the family of the two men who own it.  She also meets another man who gives violin lessons as he attempts to become a concert violinist. 

But in the late nineteenth century in the West, Chinese immigrants are not welcome.  The miners insist that the Chinese men take their jobs and there are riots and violence against them.  The government passes the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which suspended Chinese immigration for ten years and made Chinese immigrants ineligible for naturalization.  After that the violence against the immigrants increased, ending in Jacob's case with him, the grocery owners and his friend arrested and falsely charged with murdering a white grocery store owner.  

This book is based in truth.  The author's father was driving through Idaho and stopped to read a roadside marker.  He was shocked to see that it memorialized a place where Chinese men were lynched for murder.  Zhang researched the event and from that her novel emerged.  This was a New York Times Notable book and deserves the acclaim it has gotten. I listened to this novel and the female narrator was perfect to portray Daiyu.   Most Americans know little if anything about the Chinese Exclusion Act or the wave of violence against the Chinese who were brought here to build the transcontinental railroad then discriminated against when American workers moved into the West Coast.  This book is recommended for historical fiction readers and those interested in other cultures.