Books : On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 929.20899510795
EAN: 9780679768524
ISBN: 0679768521
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 448
Publication Date: August 27, 1996
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: August 27, 1996
Sales Rank: 15825
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Out of the stories heard in her childhood in Los Angeles's Chinatown and years of research, See has constructed this sweeping chronicle of her Chinese-American family, a work that takes in stories of racism and romance, entrepreneurial genius and domestic heartache, secret marriages and sibling rivalries, in a powerful history of two cultures meeting in a new world. 82 photos.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
This is a history of the family of Authoress Lisa See. It reads like a good 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:  -
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 did one child, one husband, and no job create 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 recommend this for anyone interested in Asian American history, but I personally would not purchase it for my library.
Rating:  -
I enjoyed this book very much. Amazing to read about one man'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, but it was a wonderful story.
Rating: -
There's not much magic realism or mystic exoticism about this blunt, detailed, multi-generational history of an immigrant family. If you're looking for a novel, you'll 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, but here in this book it becomes more vivid because See includes 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 every 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 ... Read More
Rating: -
I had read "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" and just loved it. This book is just as absorbing. The reader is transported to another time and place. I enjoy historical fiction. This is a good story based on the history of Lisa See's family. It was obviously a labor of love for her. I would recommend it especially to those who are interested in West Coast history, from the late 19th century to WWII-era.
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