Jenny Tinghui Zhang

A propulsive and dazzling debut novel set against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act, about a Chinese girl fighting to claim her place in the 1880s American West Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she is forced to keep reinventing herself to survive. From a calligraphy school, to a San Francisco brothel, to a shop tucked into the Idaho mountains, we follow Daiyu on a desperate quest to outrun the tragedy that chases her. As anti-Chinese sentiment sweeps across the country in a wave of unimaginable violence, Daiyu must draw on each of the selves she has been-including the ones she most wants to leave behind-in order to finally claim her own name and story. At once a literary tour de force and a groundbreaking work of historical fiction, Four Treasures of the Sky announces Jenny Tinghui Zhang as an indelible new voice. Steeped in untold history and Chinese folklore, this novel is a spellbinding feat.

Four Treasures of the Sky

Lindsay

If the body eats itself from the inside out, what will be the last thing to go?

There is no such thing as luck, I told him. Luck is just readiness that meets opportunity.

Here, I am finally free, but with that freedom comes a new decree: to stay free, you must stay hidden.

When winter came to our little fishing village, the cold did not move. Instead, it hung in the air. My father said the cold was attaching itself to all the drops of water that had not yet found their home in the ocean, and that was what made it stick to our clothes, our hair, even our bones.

What does it mean to be a man? My experiences then told me everything: It was a matter of believing oneself invincible and strong, and owed everything.

In America, being a boy was easy, but being a man was essential.

I have felt many things, given them many names. This one I do not want to name. It is as if someone has tied a large stone to my heart, tied it so tight that the veins are full and swelling, and dropped the stone in the deepest part of the ocean.

I want to fight, but I know it is pointless. I am not sinking because of the stone but because I am the stone.

The inkstone asks for destruction before creation— you must first destroy yourself, grind yourself into a paste, before becoming a work of art.

The clouds above list to the right, and soon they will be far from where we are now, in another land, floating above an ocean, and who knows where they will end up or if they will end up at all. I never thought about it before, but every cloud I have ever seen must have been on its way to somewhere. Those who witness clouds only ever see a moment of their journey. In this way, I could call myself a cloud.

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