Mesmerizing, magical writing (from the perspective of the two young children) interspersed with Chinese American history (the plight of immigrant families working the mines and building the railroads).
Apparently it’s been lambasted for conflating Chinese with Cantonese language/people, but I wouldn’t know.
I enjoyed it overall: the story itself and its setting in Gold Rush NorCal, the incorporation of Chinese symbolism, and Zhang’s writing style:
She thinks of the other direction. The hills where she was born, and the sun that bleaches sky and brightens grass. She thinks about when she stood in a dead lake and held what men desired and died for. She thinks that was nothing, really, compared to the way the noonday sun makes the grass blaze. Horizon to horizon a shimmer. Who could truly grasp it, the huge and maddening glint, the ever-shifting mirage, the grass that refused to be owned or pinned but changed with every angle of light: what that land was, and to whom, death or life, good or bad, lucky or unlucky, countless lives birthed and destroyed by its terror and generosity.
(Thanks, @sgansky.)
— ᴘ. ᴍ. ʙ.
← back to books | tweet | cast