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| FOUR TREASURES OF THE SKYBy Jenny Tinghui Zhang |
| One striking feature of “Four Treasures of the Sky,” Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s engrossing, eventful first novel, takes the form of an absence: Although much of this epic late-19th-century tale unfolds in the American West, there is not a memorable moment involving a horse. |
| The dearth of pounding hooves and accompanying dust clouds is telling; Zhang has trained her gaze on an area of American history that has gone largely unnoticed in westerns, even revisionist ones: the Chinese immigrants who built railroads and worked in mines — only to be met with racist persecution when they tried to assimilate into American life. |
| A series of cruel misadventures buffets Zhang’s protagonist, a Chinese teenager named Daiyu, from a comfortable, loving childhood into this unstable American milieu. Her troubles begin with her name; Daiyu’s eponym is Lin Daiyu, a tragic figure of legend who dies spitting blood after the family of her beloved tricks him into marrying someone else. Although Daiyu grapples with the legacy of her name throughout the novel, there is a more immediate cause of her ill fortune: the sudden flight of her parents, whose practice of sheltering members of a secret society opposed to the Qing court has landed them in danger. Twelve-year-old Daiyu is left with her grandmother, who, for the girl’s protection, disguises her as a boy and sends her to Zhifu, a city by the ocean. There Daiyu finds work sweeping the floors of a school run by a master calligrapher whose teachings form the spiritual and intellectual core of this novel. Calligraphy becomes a vocation for Daiyu. “Now, with a live, beating brush in hand,” Zhang writes, “I felt different pieces of my being sliding into place, as if I had just unlocked an extraordinary secret about myself.” |
| Daiyu’s studies are cut short when she is kidnapped by a friendly stranger at a fish market. Held captive for more than a year, she is forced to learn English; smuggled inside a bucket of coal on a cargo ship to San Francisco; and sold into prostitution at 14. All of this in the first 80 pages! |
| Zhang’s descriptive prose is an arresting combination of earthy and lyric. “The tomatoes were sensitive and needy,” she writes of Daiyu’s childhood garden, “so we tended to them often, caressing their yellow-green skins that strained with mysterious energy.” The room of one of Daiyu’s fellow prostitutes “still smells like her, the whistle of citrus layering the air.” Before being sold to a madam who steps through a crowd of men “like wind cutting through hanging sheets,” Daiyu crouches among a collection of naked, frightened girls who remind her of visiting the fish market in Zhifu: “I and many others walked around each vendor, gazing hungrily at the fish, minds already racing forward to what it would taste like, how long it would take to scale, whether or not the meat was good, whether the eyeballs would pop in our mouths, how buttery the brain would taste, how soft the bones would be, soft enough to break between our teeth and leave in a wet pile on the table.” |
| By conspiring with the mixed-race son of a wealthy white man — a boy with as little interest in taking Daiyu’s virginity as she has in yielding it — she manages to escape the brothel before she is violated. The two flee together to Boise, Idaho. Their success at eluding Daiyu’s predatory madam and the Hip Yee tong, the bloodthirsty gang that controls the brothel, is one of many junctures where Zhang’s novel seems to tilt toward a conventional redemption story. But on her first night in Boise, Daiyu is sexually assaulted. She abandons her companion and lives as a man for the rest of the novel, binding her breasts and going by the name of Jacob Li, even after she finds refuge working for a pair of successful Chinese shopkeepers in Pierce, Idaho. |
| “Four Treasures of the Sky” moves with nimble economy through Daiyu’s dislocations while poignantly rendering her struggle to maintain a coherent sense of self. At one point, she notes, “My hands are bigger now, can carry more than before. They have changed since the days of helping my mother or working in the garden or holding a calligraphy brush. These are still good hands, I remind myself. These are still my hands.” Her solitude is alleviated by the appearance of her namesake, Lin Daiyu, who arrives as an interlocutor and performs the functions of companion, protector and occasional heckler. While psychologically sound, these projections at times feel overworked; the original story of Lin Daiyu, told briefly in the novel’s early pages, lacks sufficient potency to bear so much narrative weight. |
| While living and working in Pierce, Daiyu encounters the novel’s romantic hero: Nelson Wong, the American-born son of a Chinese father, a gifted violinist and teacher. Here again, Zhang thwarts conventional expectation; the burgeoning love between Daiyu and Nelson is stifled by his belief that she is male. Zhang deftly evokes the personal cost of Daiyu’s disguise: “I learned to hide my natural reactions, my propensity to laugh at small things that enchanted me, to instead handle things with terseness and deliberation, not tenderness.” Unable to touch Nelson as she watches him sleep, Daiyu locates her longing in a memory: “Once, I wanted a fish from the fish market. I wanted it so badly that I could not see anything else, could only feel the satisfaction of it slipping down my throat. I craved nothing more than the fullness that would come, the heat from being fed.” |
| Throughout the novel, Zhang adopts a stylistic tic of avoiding contractions. The inevitable formality of this device is offset by her exuberant prose, but it hampers her dialogue with a generic stiffness that undercuts the variety and individuality of speakers. This weakness becomes more pronounced in the novel’s second half, when Daiyu and her storekeeper allies — and eventually Nelson — clash with the ratcheting racism and mistrust of their white neighbors. The root causes of white enmity will be all too familiar to contemporary readers: economic competition, mistrust of cultural differences and the virulent wish for a scapegoat. “I am beginning to realize that in this place called Idaho, which they call the West, being Chinese can be something like a disease,” Daiyu narrates. “I am something they cannot fathom. I am something they fear. We all are.” America’s current rash of violent attacks against Asian Americans is a shameful reminder of how little distance we have traveled in more than a century. |
| As tragedy ensues, Daiyu’s longing for home and her wish to belong are wrenching to read about. “There is a difference between being a newcomer to a city and being in a world that does not resemble you, that reminds you every moment of your strangeness,” she reflects. “This is what Idaho is to me. And so, when our Chinese customers come asking for millet and green onions, buying licorice and cinnamon, I watch them with tenderness, following their movements. I miss you, and I do not even know you, I want to say to the miner, the launderer, the servant.” |
| In an author’s note after the story is finished, Zhang explains that she based the Idaho portion of her novel on a historical atrocity. The resonance and immediacy of these barbarous 19th-century events are testament to Zhang’s storytelling powers, and should stand as a warning to all of us. |
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