two hundred public words 5/30
Five entries in a row, man.
Laurence Yep. He gets a whole entry to himself.
Laurence Yep is a Chinese-American young adult fiction author whose second novel, Dragonwings, was published in 1975. He'd written a sci-fi young adult novel two years earlier, and it's good, too -- and strange in a way that for me, marks reasonable sci fi.
Anyway, Dragonwings, which I read for the first time not too many years after it was published, is the story of a young Chinese immigrant to the land of the 'Golden Mountain', e.g. the US, around 1903 or so. Maybe a bit earlier. It is set in Chinatown in San Francisco, and then, after the 1906 earthquake, in the Oakland hills. The spark that set Yep off was a newspaper story from near the turn of the century about a Chinese pilot of one of the earliest airplanes... right after the Wright brothers, with one of those wood-and-canvas boxy prop planes.
It's a brilliant book. It's fantastic with its historical detail, about Chinatown at the time, about the 1906 earthquake, and about early aviation. It was of its time, the mid 1970s, in that it turned ethnic stereotypes on their heads. I remember reading it and loving that when the boy spoke with his father, they spoke in Chinese -- the Cantonese dialect -- and it was in italics, so you could see that there was a whole other life going on. It allowed the characters to comment on what white Americans were saying to them, and sort of turned the "other" thing around. There were also interesting moments where the boy, Moon Shadow, reacted with distrust and in some cases disgust to (white) American customs, such as drinking milk. There are details about opium addiction, and immigration law, and tongs (which Yep rescues from the clichéd Hollywood/Charlie Chan view of them, describing them as neighborhood mutual associations...)
The book is so good that it was adopted fairly early in plenty of middle school reading programs, as a novel that should be read in sixth or seventh grade. I have taught it probably two or three times -- it's not an easy read for sixth graders, or at least not for the sixth graders I taught in Oakland, years ago. There is a lot of metaphorical language and good, strong vocabulary.
After the success of Dragonwings, Yep wrote other things too -- but he kept coming back to some fictional version of this Chinese immigrant, and later, Chinese-American family. He went forward in time to the 1960s, and then backwards in time to the 1860s, with two stories of Moon Shadow's ancestors, or nearly. It's a little complicated. I think I've tried to draw a family tree and gotten kind of tangled up in it. But, again, the stories are fantastic examples of historical fiction for young adults, with incredible (and interestingly written, not didactic and boring or lectury) detail about China, and the province that Canton (Guangdong) is in, with its rebellious stirrings against the Manchus. Yep then went forward and wrote two novels about the earlier Chinese immigrant experience, with the Chinese laborers who were building the eastward-stretching railroad, and then, miners and anti-Chinese racism in mining towns. The most recent book in the Lee family series (I haven't read this one, yet... I was waiting for paperback, but it must be in paperback by now) sort of completes his cycle by linking the second Lee book -- Child of the Owl, which is set in the 1960s, with that protagonist's father, a Chinese-American teen who played basketball, in Dragon Road, in the 1940s.
He's written a lot of Chinese-set fantasies, too, and contemporary mysteries set around Chinatown. But it's his family chronicles "of the Golden Mountain" that I love the most. This is a list of the books, in chronological order, with the rough years covered:
The Serpent's Children roughly 1849
Mountain Light it SAYS 1885, which doesn't make much sense ... I think it should be the 1870s or so...
Dragon's Gate 1876, Transcontinental RR
The Traitor 1885, in the US -- mining camps
Dragonwings 1903 -- San Francisco and the Bay Area... and the 1906 Earthquake
Dragon Road 1939 -- Chinatown in SF
Child of the Owl 1965 -- Chinatown in SF
Sea Glass 1970 -- Monterey-ish, I think. There's abalone diving, that's all I remember.
There's another series, more contemporary, that I think is also really good:
Ribbons
The Cook's Family and
The Amah
I highly recommend everything he's written, to be honest. A fantasy of mine is to be wandering around Pacific Grove and just randomly meet Laurence Yep. He lives there.
Laurence Yep. He gets a whole entry to himself.
Laurence Yep is a Chinese-American young adult fiction author whose second novel, Dragonwings, was published in 1975. He'd written a sci-fi young adult novel two years earlier, and it's good, too -- and strange in a way that for me, marks reasonable sci fi.
Anyway, Dragonwings, which I read for the first time not too many years after it was published, is the story of a young Chinese immigrant to the land of the 'Golden Mountain', e.g. the US, around 1903 or so. Maybe a bit earlier. It is set in Chinatown in San Francisco, and then, after the 1906 earthquake, in the Oakland hills. The spark that set Yep off was a newspaper story from near the turn of the century about a Chinese pilot of one of the earliest airplanes... right after the Wright brothers, with one of those wood-and-canvas boxy prop planes.
It's a brilliant book. It's fantastic with its historical detail, about Chinatown at the time, about the 1906 earthquake, and about early aviation. It was of its time, the mid 1970s, in that it turned ethnic stereotypes on their heads. I remember reading it and loving that when the boy spoke with his father, they spoke in Chinese -- the Cantonese dialect -- and it was in italics, so you could see that there was a whole other life going on. It allowed the characters to comment on what white Americans were saying to them, and sort of turned the "other" thing around. There were also interesting moments where the boy, Moon Shadow, reacted with distrust and in some cases disgust to (white) American customs, such as drinking milk. There are details about opium addiction, and immigration law, and tongs (which Yep rescues from the clichéd Hollywood/Charlie Chan view of them, describing them as neighborhood mutual associations...)
The book is so good that it was adopted fairly early in plenty of middle school reading programs, as a novel that should be read in sixth or seventh grade. I have taught it probably two or three times -- it's not an easy read for sixth graders, or at least not for the sixth graders I taught in Oakland, years ago. There is a lot of metaphorical language and good, strong vocabulary.
After the success of Dragonwings, Yep wrote other things too -- but he kept coming back to some fictional version of this Chinese immigrant, and later, Chinese-American family. He went forward in time to the 1960s, and then backwards in time to the 1860s, with two stories of Moon Shadow's ancestors, or nearly. It's a little complicated. I think I've tried to draw a family tree and gotten kind of tangled up in it. But, again, the stories are fantastic examples of historical fiction for young adults, with incredible (and interestingly written, not didactic and boring or lectury) detail about China, and the province that Canton (Guangdong) is in, with its rebellious stirrings against the Manchus. Yep then went forward and wrote two novels about the earlier Chinese immigrant experience, with the Chinese laborers who were building the eastward-stretching railroad, and then, miners and anti-Chinese racism in mining towns. The most recent book in the Lee family series (I haven't read this one, yet... I was waiting for paperback, but it must be in paperback by now) sort of completes his cycle by linking the second Lee book -- Child of the Owl, which is set in the 1960s, with that protagonist's father, a Chinese-American teen who played basketball, in Dragon Road, in the 1940s.
He's written a lot of Chinese-set fantasies, too, and contemporary mysteries set around Chinatown. But it's his family chronicles "of the Golden Mountain" that I love the most. This is a list of the books, in chronological order, with the rough years covered:
The Serpent's Children roughly 1849
Mountain Light it SAYS 1885, which doesn't make much sense ... I think it should be the 1870s or so...
Dragon's Gate 1876, Transcontinental RR
The Traitor 1885, in the US -- mining camps
Dragonwings 1903 -- San Francisco and the Bay Area... and the 1906 Earthquake
Dragon Road 1939 -- Chinatown in SF
Child of the Owl 1965 -- Chinatown in SF
Sea Glass 1970 -- Monterey-ish, I think. There's abalone diving, that's all I remember.
There's another series, more contemporary, that I think is also really good:
Ribbons
The Cook's Family and
The Amah
I highly recommend everything he's written, to be honest. A fantasy of mine is to be wandering around Pacific Grove and just randomly meet Laurence Yep. He lives there.