The Lost Daughter of Happiness

by Geling Yan

Book Overview

Los Angeles Times bestseller--now in paperback. A "sensuous and disquieting new novel" New York Times] from one of China's most acclaimed novelists, the award-winning screenwriter of Joan Chen's film... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786866543
• ISBN13: 9780786866540
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Hyperion Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

writer explodes her own feeling

Geling Yan is a sharp and powerful Chinese woman, who could analyze and judge her own nation from different perspectives with insider and outsider's view points. In general, the novel provides very good historical background on Chinese immigrants; how Chinese spiced up the social chemistry of that time. Even though I find many stories that are obscure and hard to believe, I gave 5 stars for this novel, because of her writing style and good judgments. Writing style is interesting; talking to the hero from different time, I guess she reflected her own feeling experienced while writing the novel. In general, I got the feeling that the author, through her novel, explodes her own feelings and judgments about Chinese immigrants in US and racism against Chinese that existed and still existing.

A Wonderful Story of Hope and Survival

Fusang is kidnapped from her tea-growing village in the mountains of China and shipped to San Francisco. While many of the other young women die on the journey, she survives and is sold into a brothel, becoming one of many women lining the windows of Chinatown. She is sought after because of her beauty and friendly nature and a wealthy, young Californian falls in love with her. However Da Yong, a notorious criminal is obsessed with owning her.There's enough of the story right there to keep you tuning the pages of this five star story that is filled with wonderful writing. I just loved this book.Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne

Eye-Opening Piece of History in Avant-Garde Style

This book sheds light on a really eye-opening bit of history in the free-for-all boomtown that San Francisco was in the late 19th Century. The style is interesting as well: a contemporary Chinese immigrant to the US speaks directly to a Chinese prostitute in the 19th Century, experiencing her life in those turbulent times and seeing what has changed and what has not. The prostitute, Fusang, is enigmatic because she defies categorization. She does not need to be rescued and, despite her lot, she is not an object of pity. She is who she is, accepts her fate, and has an almost Boddhisattva-like compassion for those who wrong her.

hobbesian

Chris realized that he had never, ever understood Fusang. -The Lost Daughter of HappinessGeling Yan, a widely respected young Chinese author, immigrated to the United States after the Tienanmen Square massacre. She is best known here for the movie Xiu Xiu : The Sent Down Girl, the script for which she cowrote with director and childhood friend Joan Chen, from Yan's own short story. In this new novel, set in the 1870s, she has borrowed a figure from history, Fusang, the most famous prostitute in San Francisco, and has imagined an unusual lover for her, a 12 year old white boy named Chris.Approaching the issue of anti-Chinese racism through these two characters, she tells a tale of slavery, rape and murder, and, ostensibly, love. I say ostensibly because Chris and Fusang remain completely opaque throughout the novel; we can never comprehend their motivations or thought processes. One of the things that helps to make them so mysterious is that the novel is narrated by a female descendant of Fusang, who has gathered 160 texts about the Chinese experience in San Francisco, in an effort to understand her enigmatic ancestor's life.I may well be wide of the mark here, but it seems like Yan's point may be that Fusang and Chris are equally incomprehensible to each other, as they are to us. In fact, though the novel has the structure of an epic love story, the message would seem to be that there is something fundamentally illusory in such interracial love affairs. At one point she says of Chris : He has yet to realize that the infatuation one feels for what one cannot understand is just as violent as the animosity.This linkage of racist hatred with cross-cultural romance, though awfully harsh, has more than a grain of truth to it. Equally stern is her later judgment of Chris, when he wants Fusang to marry him : It is as if being with you, Fusang, is not a matter of anything so shallow as love or happiness, but rather a grand sacrifice. Or perhaps when love reaches this stage it crowds out ordinary feelings and becomes a doctrine, an ideal, that can only be realized through sacrifice. He is using you to enact his sacrifice for the ideal of love. He also wants to show everyone of his race and yours that his self-sacrifice will form a bridge across the racial divide.It's hard to imagine a more stinging indictment of the kind of racial understanding which, though it masquerades as selflessness and acceptance of others, is really based as much on objectification of those "others" as is racism.In what I found the most powerful passage of the book, which after all is an examination of racism and violence directed against Chinese-Americans, Yan, in discussing the causes of a riot, reveals just how universal and non-specific is the human hatred which fuels such incidents, and even links it to the Cultural Revolution in China : Hatred is amazing. It makes people self-righteous; it drives them with

Interesting look at nineteenth Chinese immigrants in USA

Though the California Gold Rush was over two decades ago, many Chinese immigrate to Gold Mountain as they call San Francisco in hopes of making a fortune. However, not all the Chinese living in San Francisco voluntarily crossed the Pacific. For example Fusang was kidnapped in her homeland and brought to California where she was sold to serve as a prostitute used by many white males. Only twelve, Chris finds Fusang's aloof detachment quite attractive and begins to obsess over the Oriental woman. This begins a lifetime in which Chris watches Fusang as her life unfolds mostly in a negative way over the next forty or so years. THE LOST DAUGHTER OF HAPPINESS uses a real person (Fusang) to provide a glimpse at the American mistreatment and prejudice towards the first wave of Chinese immigrants. The historical setting is quite deep and enhances an intriguing plot. However, Fusang, though a genuine person, never comes across as real to readers. They never understand her motives in spite of following along side Chris forty years of her life. The same is said of Chris who is a fictionalized account of a prostitute follower, but his motives seem contrived. Geling Yan shows much talent especially in describing the era, but the inability for the audience to feel anything towards Fusang leaves the plot a bit short and disappointing.Harriet Klausner