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.
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It was like riding in a treasure chest, Ling thought. CELESTIAL RAILROAD, 1
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(@SceptreBooks, 25 August 2016, 280 pages, paperback, copy from @AmazonUK #AmazonVine)
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I'd never heard of the author before. I decided to read this because the blurb intrigued me. I don't know much about Chinese American history so I thought the book would be interesting. It certainly was. The book also explores immigration and the migrant experience which I haven't read a lot of. The book is split into four sections and each one tells the story of a different character, three are based on real-life historical figures which I found very interesting. The first story is Ling's, he's an orphan from China and we follow his story to Gold Mountain in California. Ling is my favourite character. He stayed in my head even when we reached the end of his journey. The four stories are incredibly sad at times and have a lot in common such as racism and violence. These characters will stay with me for a long time.
