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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
A New York Times Notable Book
From the author of The Welsh Girl comes a groundbreaking, provocative new novel.
Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience.
Inhabiting four lives--a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption--this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive--as much through love as blood.
Building fact into fiction, spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses each of these stories--three inspired by real historical characters--to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese American, but American.
Author Notes
PETER HO DAVIES 's novel, The Fortunes , won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the Chautauqua Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is also the author of The Welsh Girl , long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and a London Times best-seller, as well as two critically acclaimed collections of short stories. His fiction has appeared in Harpers , the Atlantic , the Paris Review, and Granta and has been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories .
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Though billed as a novel, The Fortunes could more aptly be described as a collection of four novellas, each of which explores a different facet of Chinese-American experience. The first section, "Gold," is set during the mid-19th century and follows Ling, an orphan, from his childhood on Pearl River in China to Gold Mountain, Calif., where he works first in a laundry and then as a valet before becoming an unlikely organizer of Chinese workers building the Central Pacific Railway. In "Silver," Davies imagines the lonely inner life of 1930s actress Anna May Wong, Hollywood's first Chinese-American star, who has affairs with many leading men but never marries any of them. "Jade" takes place in the 1980s, against the backdrop of the dying American auto industry, and focuses on the mistaken identity of a Chinese-American man taken to be Japanese in a deadly strip club brawl. In "Pearl," the final section, a present-day middle-aged American writer, whose mother was from China, now finds himself there for the first time to adopt a baby girl with his Caucasian wife. The book's scope is impressive, but what's even more staggering is the utter intimacy and honesty of each character's introspection. More extraordinary still is the depth and the texture created by the juxtaposition of different eras, making for a story not just of any one person but of hundreds of years and tens of millions of people. Davies (The Welsh Girl) has created a brilliant, absorbing masterpiece. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* British-born of Welsh and Chinese parentage, Davies (The Welsh Girl, 2007) has lived stateside since 1992, but this is his first U.S.-set title. In it he explores the history of his adopted home in four sections. In Gold, he links the completion of the transcontinental railroad by Chinese workers to magnate Charlie Crocker's mixed-race Hong Kong-born manservant Ah Ling. In Silver, Hollywood's first Chinese American movie star, Anna May Wong, escapes her greatest celluloid humiliation, losing the role of a lifetime to a German American actress in yellowface by taking the trip of a lifetime to a homeland where she's never been. In Jade, Jimmy Choi debates the truth of his friend Vincent Chin's tragic death and how the subsequent lenient sentencing of Chin's murderers marked the start of a pan-Asian political movement. In Pearl, a mixed-race Chinese American man and his wife travel to China to claim their daughter-to-be. Intertwining fact with fictional license and creative finesse, Davies charts the conflicted, complicated journey of being a minority American through multiple generations. Rich rewards await readers searching for superbly illuminating historical fiction; think Geraldine Brooks' Caleb's Crossing (2011) or Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy.--Hong, Terry Copyright 2016 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Davies (The Welsh Girl) deftly weaves together four stories of the Chinese American experience to create a rich tapestry of what it takes to find acceptance with oneself and in one's country. A 19th-century laundry worker, a Chinese film star, a friend of someone killed in a hate crime, and a half-Chinese man looking to adopt a Chinese baby tell their stories of life in America and how their "Chinese-ness" has helped define their American existence. Although uniquely different, the characters are uniquely the same: racism, questions of identity, the need for acceptance, and the need to be "all-American" surface in all of them. Raw, witty, honest, and unflinching, The Fortunes manages to capture the heart of growing up Chinese American. Impressively narrated by the talented James Chen, who brings an authenticity to the story with his numerous accents and reserved yet powerful telling. VERDICT In this emotionally gripping novel, Davies proves that he's a masterful writer. ["A thought-provoking literary work": LJ 8/16 review of the Houghton Harcourt hc.]-Erin Cataldi, Johnson Cty. P.L., Franklin, IN © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.