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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