Customer Reviews

Lost Daughter of Happiness

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Chris realized that he had never, ever understood Fusang. -The Lost Daughter of Happiness

Geling Yan, a widely respected young Chinese author, immigrated to the United States after the Tienanmen Square massacre. She is best known here for the movie Xiu Xiu : The Sent Down Girl, the script for which she cowrote with director and childhood friend Joan Chen, from Yan's own short story. In this new novel, set in the 1870s, she has borrowed a figure from history, Fusang, the most famous prostitute in San Francisco, and has imagined an unusual lover for her, a 12 year old white boy named Chris.

Approaching the issue of anti-Chinese racism through these two characters, she tells a tale of slavery, rape and murder, and, ostensibly, love. I say ostensibly because Chris and Fusang remain completely opaque throughout the novel; we can never comprehend their motivations or thought processes. One of the things that helps to make them so mysterious is that the novel is narrated by a female descendant of Fusang, who has gathered 160 texts about the Chinese experience in San Francisco, in an effort to understand her enigmatic ancestor's life.

I may well be wide of the mark here, but it seems like Yan's point may be that Fusang and Chris are equally incomprehensible to each other, as they are to us. In fact, though the novel has the structure of an epic love story, the message would seem to be that there is something fundamentally illusory in such interracial love affairs. At one point she says of Chris :

He has yet to realize that the infatuation one feels for what one cannot understand is just as violent as the animosity.

This linkage of racist hatred with cross-cultural romance, though awfully harsh, has more than a grain of truth to it. Equally stern is her later judgment of Chris, when he wants Fusang to marry him :

It is as if being with you, Fusang, is not a matter of anything so shallow as love or happiness, but rather a grand sacrifice. Or perhaps when love reaches this stage it crowds out ordinary feelings and becomes a doctrine, an ideal, that can only be realized through sacrifice. He is using you to enact his sacrifice for the ideal of love. He also wants to show everyone of his race and yours that his self-sacrifice will form a bridge across the racial divide.

It's hard to imagine a more stinging indictment of the kind of racial understanding which, though it masquerades as selflessness and acceptance of others, is really based as much on objectification of those "others" as is racism.

In what I found the most powerful passage of the book, which after all is an examination of racism and violence directed against Chinese-Americans, Yan, in discussing the causes of a riot, reveals just how universal and non-specific is the human hatred which fuels such incidents, and even links it to the Cultural Revolution in China :

Hatred is amazing. It makes people self-righteous; it drives them with a sense of mission. I'm not talking about revenge; that's too simple. People are born with a higher form of hatred, so immense it doesn't even need a target. Like love so vast no object is necessary. This kind of hatred can lie dormant for years, like a swell of darkness, and people are never even conscious of it. But once the darkness is breached, all rationality drowns and the things people do out of hatred serve only the purpose of fulfilling an overwhelming emotional need. Burning, smashing, killing, rape--they're all just channels. It doesn't even matter what started it, because people quickly become intoxicated by the sheer spectacle of destruction. Like love at the earth-shattering stage, hatred by this point feeds on itself, simply for its own sake. The pleasure of watching some person or thing destroyed by one's own hand is virtually orgasmic.

When I was a child I saw those sexual impulses they called the cultural revolution and those orgasms they called rebellion. The gratification of hatred produces the same rapture in everyone.

This is a very dark--though I would argue realistic--vision of human nature.

This darkness, combined with various scenes of violence, the emotional distance of the central characters, the sparseness of the author's prose, make this a book that many people will not enjoy. Quite honestly, I wasn't sure if I liked it until I thought about it for quite awhile. But ultimately, despite the somewhat harrowing nature of the story, the brutal honesty of Yan's ideas won me over. And the more I've thought about it, the more I appreciate it.

GRADE : A-

Though the California Gold Rush was over two decades ago, many Chinese immigrate to Gold Mountain as they call San Francisco in hopes of making a fortune. However, not all the Chinese living in San Francisco voluntarily crossed the Pacific. For example Fusang was kidnapped in her homeland and brought to California where she was sold to serve as a prostitute used by many white males.

Only twelve, Chris finds Fusang's aloof detachment quite attractive and begins to obsess over the Oriental woman. This begins a lifetime in which Chris watches Fusang as her life unfolds mostly in a negative way over the next forty or so years.

THE LOST DAUGHTER OF HAPPINESS uses a real person (Fusang) to provide a glimpse at the American mistreatment and prejudice towards the first wave of Chinese immigrants. The historical setting is quite deep and enhances an intriguing plot. However, Fusang, though a genuine person, never comes across as real to readers. They never understand her motives in spite of following along side Chris forty years of her life. The same is said of Chris who is a fictionalized account of a prostitute follower, but his motives seem contrived. Geling Yan shows much talent especially in describing the era, but the inability for the audience to feel anything towards Fusang leaves the plot a bit short and disappointing.

Harriet Klausner

The Lost Daughter of Happiness is a remarkable novel, a love story unlike any I've read. It unfolds in alternating points of view. Writing in the second person, as if she were speaking to Fusang, looking back at Fusang's life from the present day, the narrator's language is factual, unemotional, sometimes bordering on contemptuous: You are a prostitute, she says, brought to California from China, one who didn't die during the long voyage, who didn't succumb to disease or beatings after being sold into slavery. "I certainly won't let people confuse you with any of the other three thousand whores from China." Occasionally the narrator quotes histories of the California Gold Rush from which she draws her account of Fusang. Occasionally she tells Fusang tidbits about her own life as a recent Chinese immigrant, about her own perplexity understanding the ways of white people, including her husband.

The other point of view is third person, telling the story of Fusang in its own time, sometimes shifting to the lives of others, particularly Chris, the white teenager who quietly worships Fusang's beauty, whose life changes because of her. The other central character is Fusang's Chinese warlord-like kidnapper. Both men love Fusang, and to some extent hate her, in their own warped ways. Fusang, in turn, has special feelings for both men--as distinguished from the hordes of undifferentiated men who want to sleep with her, whose names she's incapable of remembering.

Whether she's describing a battle between Chinese clans (of which Fusang is the indirect cause) or the culture shock and isolation experienced by Chinese immigrants past and present, Geling writes with a fluid grace. Geling avoids sympathetic language, yet her stark portrayal of Fusang's plight is incredibly moving. Still, Geling paints Fusang as largely unaffected by pain or trauma. Fusang may just be simple-minded, but she evinces a knowingness that the other slave girls lack. She understands how to steal pleasure from pain, how to find freedom in enslavement. Unlike the other prostitutes, she's content with a diet of fish heads. There is something zen-like about her simplicity.

Geling writes powerfully about race riots in San Francisco more than a century ago and about present day skinheads who profess their racial hatred on talk shows. She writes about rape and redemption. This short but wide-ranging novel is filled with tension and ugliness while maintaining a soft, quiet tone, but it is also filled with hope and beauty. It is a stunning performance. The Lost Daughter of Happiness deserves a much larger audience.

Fusang is kidnapped from her tea-growing village in the mountains of China and shipped to San Francisco. While many of the other young women die on the journey, she survives and is sold into a brothel, becoming one of many women lining the windows of Chinatown. She is sought after because of her beauty and friendly nature and a wealthy, young Californian falls in love with her. However Da Yong, a notorious criminal is obsessed with owning her.

There's enough of the story right there to keep you tuning the pages of this five star story that is filled with wonderful writing. I just loved this book.

This book sheds light on a really eye-opening bit of history in the free-for-all boomtown that San Francisco was in the late 19th Century. The style is interesting as well: a contemporary Chinese immigrant to the US speaks directly to a Chinese prostitute in the 19th Century, experiencing her life in those turbulent times and seeing what has changed and what has not. The prostitute, Fusang, is enigmatic because she defies categorization. She does not need to be rescued and, despite her lot, she is not an object of pity. She is who she is, accepts her fate, and has an almost Boddhisattva-like compassion for those who wrong her.

The Lost Daughter of Happiness centers on Fusang, a real historical figure who was a prostitute in nineteenth-century San Francisco. The author (with some authorial intrusion, as she describes her process) very vividly describes Fusang's world. Two men love her - a young white boy who develops an obsession, and a Chinese gangster who surprises himself with his feelings for her. For the reader, the source of the men's feelings remain a bit unclear because Fusang never quite comes into focus. The closest she comes is when, with her secret smile, she realizes herself to be "a thief who steals pleasure from suffering". To live is enough for her, but she does not fear death. She knows no sorrow or anger at her (often horrible) circumstances, and neither does she concern herself with the suffering of others around her. For this reason, the reader is unable to grab onto her experience - she keeps receding into the background of her vivid surroundings.

Geling Yan is a sharp and powerful Chinese woman, who could analyze and judge her own nation from different perspectives with insider and outsider's view points.

In general, the novel provides very good historical background on Chinese immigrants; how Chinese spiced up the social chemistry of that time. Even though I find many stories that are obscure and hard to believe, I gave 5 stars for this novel, because of her writing style and good judgments. Writing style is interesting; talking to the hero from different time, I guess she reflected her own feeling experienced while writing the novel. In general, I got the feeling that the author, through her novel, explodes her own feelings and judgments about Chinese immigrants in US and racism against Chinese that existed and still existing.

I understand why Harriet is the #1 reviewer - she put in words exactly how I felt about the book. I thought the setting and "history" of the period was interesting, but I just could not become attached to any of the characters.