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

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In the story, Lin Daiyu is orphaned and when, due to trickery, she witnesses her love marry another woman she dies, and her frequent visitations during times of difficulty become a reminder to the real Daiyu to be strong and not allow herself to be destroyed. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined. 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.

This novel comes at a time when another uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes has become major headline news and anti-Chinese sentiments lurk about. A resilient brush is one that, after depositing ink on paper, can spring back up in preparation for the next stroke. Four Treasures of the Sky, the impressive debut novel by Jenny Tinghui Zhang, is a fresh approach to 19th century Wild West framed around the Chinese Exclusion Act and violence towards Chinese labororers told through the eyes of a young Chinese woman brought by force to the United States. To guide her along the way, Daiyu is often visited by the spirit of her namesake, Lin Daiyu( 林黛玉), who comes from Dream of the Red Chamber, an 18th century manuscript by Cao Xueqin considered one of the four Classic Chinese novels. This did not detract from enjoying the moments things really connect, it just could have all meshed more effectively.

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. Daiyu frequently wonders throughout the story if she would succumb to the misfortune of the character she is named after, and constantly tries to run away from the destiny attached to this name.

Daiyu does find a romantic outlet in the later half of the novel but it is thwarted simply because he believes she is a man. My reason for picking it up was to learn more about the Chinese Exclusion Act, but what kept me reading was this layered story that tugged at my heart start to finish! 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. For example, for several days, Daiyu maintains her male persona in a jail cell with four men and an open bucket. When disaster strikes and she is kidnapped, she is dispatched to San Francisco and into a new world of suffering and growth.Superbly and imaginatively written, the narrative follows a young Chinese woman in the late 1800s who is kidnapped and brought to the US. At her shuffling, loose fish slide down from the top of the heap to the tarp’s edge, where they remain vulnerable and unattended.