Four Treasures of the Sky: The compelling debut about identity and belonging in the 1880s American West

Product Information

Radiant…A treasure of a debut…[Zhang’s] first novel reveals storytelling skills both vast and specific, bringing shadowy history to light while also displaying a remarkable talent for sensory detail. with an aura of wisdom and spiritually that’s not jammed down our throats — but is sincerely moving.

It's the story of a Chinese girl who gets stolen from China and trafficked into the US to work at a brothel, it's a story of five Chinese men who get framed for the murder of a white man, and it's the untold story of so many Chinese people who lived in the US during and around the Chinese partition act (I highly recommend listening to the audiobook if you can, it has an interview with the author at the end that explains a lot of her influences). Brilliant and devastating, Four Treasures of the Sky tells the story of Daiyu, who is brought to America against her will and forced to hide who she is even as she grows into her true self.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.

A narrative that is so visceral and almost impossible to forget, therefore the emotional story at the core of Four Treasures of the Sky pales in comparison. Brings alive a heroine for the ages, an indomitable teenage girl whose relentless spirit and self-reinvention carries this story.

Though while enjoying the privileges being male presenting gives in a patriarchal society, Daiyu quickly discovers that her race marks her as an Other, a threat, and as less-than-human in the eyes of the white society. But there’s a sense of urgency in this fiction that reads real and the historical context that unfortunately holds true even in present times. I don’t know why I still get shocked by the lack of humanity humans show over the past, the present, No doubt the future. The altering identities often serve to examine power structures around gender binaries, such as how men (particularly white men) seem to have access to violence while society looks the other way as long as it is directed at someone socially deemed beneath them (by race, class, or if they are a woman). The magical realism interspersed within the story is often something that I am not a huge fan of but felt like it worked here completely.