From Publishers Weekly
Ah Lung, the youngest son in a family of silk producers, is kidnapped and forced into slavery in McCunn's underpowered latest. Though Ah Lung signs a labor contract that promises generous wages and a limited term of employment, once he begins the journey to Peru from his native southern China, he discovers the wages are nonexistent and his chances of surviving the contract are only slightly better than those of surviving the voyage to Peru. While he endures being shackled in an overcrowded ship's hold, a failed mutiny, a shipboard fire and a cholera outbreak before being unloaded and forced to do backbreaking work in a guano mine, his family, especially his wife, Bo See, and sister Moongirl, search for him. Bo See decides to grow an additional crop of silkworms to finance her husband's rescue, and Ah Lung perseveres in the harshest of conditions. McCunn has done an enormous amount of research into both Chinese slavery and silk production, and though the information is fascinating, it tends to overwhelm her narrative and undermine its tension. The book has an epic sweep, but the reading experience is only partially satisfying. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
McCunn (Moon Pearl, 2000) dramatizes the nineteenth-century practice of kidnapping Chinese men to serve as indentured slaves in the Americas. This painful story of toiling in Peruvian guano mines, told in alternate voices by Ah Lung and his wife, Bo See, traces a harrowing journey on a slave ship, the disgusting work itself, the cruelty of the overseers, and the tragedy of a helpless family left behind without their loved ones. The author brings a powerful immediacy to the story with her use of earthy, even crude, imagery: descriptions of vomit and excrement aboard ship, Bo See's meticulous work in a silk factory contrasted with Ah Lung's desperate shoveling and breathing of guano dust. The enslavement of a million Chinese men at this time was a shameful blot in history's copybook, and McCunn's story certainly prompts the reader's outrage. Unfortunately, it doesn't go much further than that. The newlyweds come off as a bit wooden, and McCunn's pedestrian style lacks the psychological depth of other writers who have tackled this subject, including Gail Tsukiyama and Lisa See. Marginally recommended. Baker, Jen
About the Author
Ruthanne Lum McCunn, of Scottish and Chinese ancestry, is the author of the classic Thousand Pieces of Gold (Design Enterprises, 1981, reissued by Beacon, 2004; over 200,000 copies sold); as well as the novels The Moon Pearl (Beacon 2000) and Wooden Fish Songs (Dutton 1995). She lives in San Francisco.
