Living Treasures

Living Treasures

by Yang Huang

Nautilus Award Winner

Gold Medal: Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Multicultural Fiction; A top 3 historical novel of 2014; Living Now Book Award Medalist; Bellwether Prize and INDIEFAB finalist
"As with her previous books, Living Treasures and My Old Faithful, Huang…explores the generational push-pull of family life in post-Tiananmen China." —Lysley Tenorio, The New York Times Book Review 

A woman can have a career and family, but which comes first?

Astarving panda eats a hen in order to nurse her cub in the dead of winter—there begins the perilous adventure of Gu Bao, a girl who grows up under the Chinese government's one-child policy. Bao falls in love with a handsome soldier during the tumultuous Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The demonstrations transfix her fellow students and kill one of her friends. Bao finds herself pregnant and faces the end of her academic career. Her grieving parents arrange for a secret abortion and ship her off to her grandparents' house in the remote countryside where she was raised.

Bao searches for her inner strength while exploring the evocative Sichuan mountain landscape. She befriends a panda mother caught in a poacher's snare, and an expectant young mother hiding from villainous one-child policy enforcers bent on giving compulsory abortions. All struggle against society to preserve the treasure of their little ones. Can Bao save a rural family from destruction, and help a giant panda along the way? She devises a daring plan that changes the lives of everyone around her.