The Lost Daughter of Happiness

About

In the 1860s, a young Chinese woman named Fusang is kidnapped and sold into prostitution in San Francisco's Chinatown. Chris, an American boy, becomes her first customer at twelve years old — beginning an obsession that will span decades. Around them, the anti-Chinese violence of Gold Rush-era California builds toward catastrophe. Yan Geling tells this story in fragments — moving between past and present, between Fusang's silence and Chris's desperate narration — to capture a history that resists the linear telling it has usually received. Fusang is not a victim waiting to be rescued; she is an enigma whose survival operates by a logic the novel respects but never fully explains. A novel about the collision of desire and exploitation in a country that was built on both — told through a woman whose mystery is the only thing no one could take from her.