toastykitten

The Serpent's Children is the prequel to Mountain Light, which I made the mistake of reading first. Cassia Young is left in charge of her family when her father goes to fight against the Manchus, and her mother dies, leaving her alone with her annoying little brother Foxfire. She has to battle both her aggressive clan trying to turn her into someone they can marry off, and a harsh famine, amid the uncertainty of China's political state, and her little brother's wanderlust and desire to leave home for something better. 

This one was really hard to read. It made me wonder about my own family's difficulties with farming, and think about why my grandparents came here, and when my aunt came here and was married to someone twice her age. There's so many questions that I don't have the answer to, and no one to ask anymore. I've only heard snippets here and there. I wish the stuff about the Chinese politics were more clearcut - in the next book, Cassia's Hakka neighbors become victims, and there's never a clear delineation of how they became so hated that their neighbors justified genocide. There's stuff about the revolutionaries, but they are not a huge part of the book, and the arguments Foxfire and his dad have about it are kind of general. 

I thought I was about to read The Serpent's Children, which I believe is the prequel to this one. Anyway, holy shit. Mountain Light is really violent; I'm only halfway through and already two people die through violence. I flipped to the Author's Note, and apparently this takes place during a time where Cantonese Red Turban (secret society) rebels carried out a genocidal campaign against the Hakka people. Laurence Yep somehow opens this story with a meet-cute where our protagonist jokester Squeaky Lau is almost killed by Cassia Young, a serious, skilled fighter, whose family has been feuding with his for generations but now they need to team up to fight the Manchus and also protect their Hakka friends. This story is really intense. 

Apparently Thief of Hearts is the last book in the Golden Mountain series, and a direct sequel to Child of the Owl, which is the one book I'm the most familiar with. Child of the Owl is set in SF Chinatown in the mid 1960s, when it was more like a small town. In the afterword, Yep says he wanted to talk about all the changes that had happened after the Fair Housing Act, and the lifting of immigration quotas. (Actually I don't think they were lifted all the way, but restrictions were eased.) Different waves of Chinese people came, and then their kids grew up and moved to the suburbs. That's where this starts - Casey, tough streetwise kid of the Child of the Owl book grows up to become a respected psychiatrist, married to a white guy, and they have a kid named Stacy in the suburbs. Stacy is now 13 and we see things through her eyes - she's a bit resentful of her parents' business, and grown a little apart from Tai-Paw, her great-grandmother, who is now living with them. The book introduces a new Chinese girl, Hong Chau, who she's expected to befriend and show around.

Stacy and Hong Chau get off on the wrong foot, and at school, she's accused of theft, and runs away. Stacy, for the first time in her life, gets insulted as a "half-breed", which stirs all kinds of conflicting emotions. The majority of the plot takes Casey, Tai-Paw, and Stacy to SF Chinatown in search of Hong Chau, and it's basically a trip through memory lane of the way things were even as it's obvious that almost nothing is the same. Many of Tai-Paw's friends are dead or moved away, and Stacy learns more about her mother's childhood and the way she grew up, as it becomes obvious that her mother has not told her much.

I don't know what it is about Laurence Yep's writing - it's very simple, but it's not dumbed down, and it's really relatable. His characters are fully realized characters, and you can genuinely empathize with every one, even if they don't act in ways you understand at first. Also...Yep captures class divisions realistically in a way that few young adult authors do - even if Casey's living in the suburbs now, several of her relatives and the characters Stacy encounters are varying degrees of poor and middle class. I guess this short novel is also one about class awakening, maybe? - Stacy in her comfy suburbs, sees where her great-grandmother raises Casey for the first time in SF Chinatown, realizing how little they had, and how hard both she and Casey had to work. There is mention of Tai-Paw's sewing sweatshop work, and how some of the sweatshops have been shut down and moved out of Chinatown. 

(Note: oh wait looks like there's one more book after this. Dragons of Silk.)