Four Treasures of the Sky

Daiyu is a young girl in a small fishing village in China, named for the doomed heroine of a beloved Chinese novel and haunted by that inheritance. When she is kidnapped and smuggled across the ocean to San Francisco, she lands in the anti-Chinese violence of the 1880s American West, a time of the Chinese Exclusion Act and open racist brutality. To survive, Daiyu takes on one borrowed identity after another, disguising herself as a boy, laboring in a laundry, and studying calligraphy while she plots her way toward freedom. Zhang folds Chinese folklore and the harsh history of Chinese immigrants into a single propulsive story about what a person will become in order to stay alive.