Book : On Gold Mountain - See, Lisa

-Titulo Original : On Gold Mountain

-Fabricante :

Vintage

-Descripcion Original:

About the Author Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of Shanghai Girls, Peony in Love, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Flower Net (an Edgar Award nominee), The Interior and Dragon Bones. She wrote the libretto for the Los Angeles Opera adaptation of On Gold Mountain and served as curator for the Autry Museum of Western Heritage’s exhibit On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience, also featured at the Smithsonian Institute. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles. In 1867, Lisa Sees great-great-grandfather arrived in America, where he prescribed herbal remedies to immigrant laborers who were treated little better than slaves. His son Fong See later built a mercantile empire and married a Caucasian woman, in spite of laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Lisa herself grew up playing in her familys antiques store in Los Angeless Chinatown, listening to stories of missionaries and prostitutes, movie stars and Chinese baseball teams. With these stories and her own years of research, Lisa See chronicles the one-hundred-year-odyssey of her Chinese-American family, a history that encompasses racism, romance, secret marriages, entrepreneurial genius, and much more, as two distinctly different cultures meet in a new world. Review Lovingly rendered. . . . A vivid tableau of a family and an era. --PeopleTerrific stuff. . . . The See familys adventures would be incredible if On Gold Mountain were fiction. --The New York Times Book ReviewWeaves together fascinating family anecdotes, imaginative details, and the historical details of immigrant life. . . . Enviably entertaining. --Amy TanAstonishing. . . . as engagingly readable as any novel. . . . comprehensive and exhaustively researched. --Los Angeles Times Book Review Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ForewordFong See, my great-grandfather, left China in 1871 as a youngster, found prosperity on the Gold Mountain (the Chinese name for the United States), and lived to reach his hundredth birthday. Rising out of a mass of nameless Asian immigrants, he became one of the richest and most prominent Chinese in the country. He lured customers into his Asian art store by selling tickets to see a stuffed mermaid. He loved money, and had a childlike enthusiasm for fancy cars. He also had a way with women. My family always “knew” that Fong See had two wives. The marriage between Fong See and Letticie Pruett-my Caucasian great-grandmother-would go on to establish the See name. The second wife, a Chinese waif who had supported herself making firecrackers, was only sixteen when she married my great-grandfather, who was sixty-four at the time. This family always lived under the name of Fong. Altogether, Fong See sired twelve children-five Eurasian, seven Chinese-the last born when he was in his late eighties. This is the story of the Sees and the Fongs and how they assimilated into America. As a girl, I spent frequent weekends and most of my summer vacations with my paternal grandparents in Chinatown. We would pass through a moon gate guarded by two huge stone lions and enter the dark, cool recesses of our family’s Chinese antique store, the F. Suie One Company, a gigantic mercantile museum that contained, among other things, porcelains taken from the royal kiln and floated downriver on sampans; altars pillaged from provincial temples; and huge architectural carvings shipped in sections to be reconstructed by Fong See’s sons in one of his many warehouses. At lunchtime, Grandma Stella and I would walk up the street to a restaurant that must have had a real name but that we just called “the little place.” Along the way we’d stop to chat with Blackie at the Sam Sing Butcher Shop, with its gold-leafed roast pig in the window. We’d stop in at Margaret’s International Grocery and brose through the aisles with their salted plu