On Gold Mountain
The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family
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4.2 • 85 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of The Island of Sea Women, here is the true story of the one-hundred-year-odyssey of the author’s Chinese-American family, combining years of research with “fascinating family anecdotes, imaginative details, and the historical details of immigrant life” (Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club).
"As engagingly readable as any novel." —Los Angeles Times Book Review
In 1867, Lisa See's great-great-grandfather arrived in America, where he prescribed herbal remedies to immigrant laborers who were treated little better than slaves. His son Fong See later built a mercantile empire and married a Caucasian woman, in spite of laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Lisa herself grew up playing in her family's antiques store in Los Angeles's Chinatown, listening to stories of missionaries and prostitutes, movie stars and Chinese baseball teams.
See’s family history encompasses secret marriages, entrepreneurial genius, romance, racism, and much more, as two distinctly different cultures meet in a new world in this “lovingly rendered…vivid tableau of a family and an era” (People).
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Every bit as captivating as her bestselling fiction, Lisa See’s On Gold Mountain maps the true story of her family’s remarkable journey from a life of poverty in China to Californian prosperity. See gives us a vivid, sometimes startling glimpse into a community that’s often overlooked in history books, leavening the mood with dignified grace and flashes of humor. Combining rigorous historical research with stories that her grandparents told her, she traces four generations’ worth of hard-fought striving. It’s an exciting tale full of violence, discrimination, forbidden romance, financial folly, and unlikely victories that almost reads like an Asian American Dickens saga.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This account of a Chinese family's adventures in America over the course of a century offers a tapestry of immigrant life.
