The One Hundred Year Odyssey of a Chinese American Family.
When she was a girl, Lisa See spent summer in the cool, dark recesses of her family's antiques store in Los Angeles' Chinatown. There, her grandmother and great-aunt told her intriguing, colourful stories about their family's past - stories of missionaries, concubines, tong wars, glamorous nightclubs, and the determined struggle to triumph over racist laws and discrimination. They spoke of how Lisa's great-great-grandfather emigrated from his Chinese village to the United States, and how his son followed him.
As an adult, See spent five years collecting the details of her family's remarkable history. She interviewed nearly one hundred relatives and pored over documents at the National Archives, the immigration office, and in countless attics, basements, and closets for the intimate nuances of her ancestors' lives.
The result is a vivid, sweeping family portrait that is at once particular and universal, telling the story not only of one family, but of the Chinese people in America - and of America itself, a country that both welcomes and reviles its immigrants like no other culture in the world.
