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Product Reviews:
On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family |
Rating: 4 (out of 5)
Summary: Slow start, however ultimately a great read
Comments: This was a required read for a college sociology course, however unfortunately I just skimmed it and never fully appreciated the work. I purchased it up again several years later and was really surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It did take some perseverance to get through, it was not the almost all quick paced book I have read, however it was an interesting story. |
Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: A wonderful book
Comments: This is a history of the family of Authoress Lisa See. It reads like a great novel. Her grandfather came to the United States in the early 1900s and met and married a white woman and had several children with her. The story goes back and forth between California and China. It is a must read. |
Rating: 3 (out of 5)
Summary: Interesting historical perspective, however writing style can be over-the-top
Comments: It is difficult for me to say whether or not I liked this book. While I am drawn to its narrative, which covers several generations of Asian Americans, I had a hard time stomaching the author's style at certain points. For example:
"'This is a terrible idea!!' Eddy yelled, whacking his hand through the air like a karate master trying to split a pile of bricks."
"Why did1child,1husband, and no job make such a crushing burden for Stella? Because she had already been crushed by her childhood... [B]ecause her hopes, her expectations, her dreams had been crushed."
Overall, I'd endorse this for anyone interested in Asian American history, however I personally would not purchase it for my library. |
Rating: 4 (out of 5)
Summary: What a great family history written as a novel
Comments: I enjoyed this book much. Amazing to read about1man's dreams and hard work from 4 generations ago still leaves a legacy and a still-running store to this day. I was broken-hearted reading about the treatment of the Chinese during the railroad building era of the West. Bigotry and racism are not new to America, and not limited to just Africans. I got confused sometimes with all the names, and had to refer to the family tree in the beginning of the book, however it was a wonderful story. |
Rating: 5 (out of 5)
Summary: A Scrutable Family Success
Comments: there is not much magic realism or mystic exoticism about this blunt, detailed, multi-generational history of an immigrant family. If you are looking for a novel, you will find that Lisa See has written several. I repeat, this is a history, and it will be of interest chiefly to historians and other social scientists, professional or arm-chair.
Ms. See's great-great-grandfather arrived in America in 1867. The shabby treatment that he and other Chinese immigrants received is part of American history, however here in this book it becomes more vivid because See Comes with the reader in her "family album." Suffice it to say that the Fong/See family shrugged off indignities, worked hard, brought kinfolk to share the work despite arbitrary and unfair hurdles, took root in America, and succeeded more or less to the measure of their immigrant dreams. So it was with my mother's immigrant family from North Europe, and so it has been with e immigrant complement to America's cultural universality. Quite a few of the Fong/See second-comers spent time at the detention center of Angel Island, as described in the book "Island" which I reviewed a few days ago.
The drama in this history of the branching See family - what makes this book memorable - is a love story, the secret and perilous marriage of Fong See, the son of the 1867 immigrant, to a woman of European heritage, Letticie Pruett. Interracial marriage was illegal for decades in California, as in many states, and the penalties were a lot more severe than mere annulment. The Fong See clan ran the risk of deportation, and the couple had reason to fear ostracism and personal violence.
there is a sheaf of family photos in the center of the book. there is a snapshot of Richard See - fourth generation, I believe - with his buddies in Levis and Pendletons, getting ready for a fishing trip. Then there is Lisa herself as a girl in Chinese silks, however gasp!! Lisa has wide European eyes, long blonde hair, and freckles!!
My mother's sister and her Norwegian-American husband Jim, the last of my Minnesota kin to live on a homestead farm, came to visit me in San Francisco in the 1970s.1evening I took them, with other relatives and friends, to a Chinese restaurant. Jim is not what you'd call loquacious; he was sitting with his back to the room and paying more heed to the talk at other tables than to us. Just behind him, a family was talking about visits to colleges, arguing the merits of Cal Tech versus MIT. Jim got curious and turned around - discretely? oh yeah!! - to see what the family looked like. Then he gaped at me and whispered "them folks are Chinese!!" "Well," said I, "what do you expect in a Chinese restaurant?" "however they're speakin' English!!" quoth he.
The heart and soul of Lisa See's history of her extended family is exactly what my uncle did not understand. The Chinese who came to America were not insidious strangers and inscrutable menaces to European American culture. They were just plain folk.
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