The Lost Daughter of Happiness [VINTAGE 2001][FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Fine unread condition black boards, black spine, and gold spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped photographic dust jacket. Includes Author Dedication; About the Author and About the Translator. Translated by Cathy Silber. "Gerling Yan stands as an eminent writer from the Chinese diaspora. Her fiction has gained a high reputation in and outside China. The Lost Daughter of Happiness is her major novel, which combines myth and history and opens a new perspective on the American immigrant experience. It is an ambitous, eloquent, and unique book." - Ha Jin, author. "Geling Yan's extraordinary novel is a dream enfloding a nightmare, and a nightmare lightened by dream, a delicate love story between an American innocent and a Chinese prostitute, set in the brutal world of Gold Rush San Francisco. And it is much more. The Lost Daughter of Happiness is finally a contemporary immigrant's testament to the Adam and Eve of a poisoned American garden." - Bharati Mukherjee, author. "An erotic epic bursting with intelligence, forbidden emotions, and disregard for easy answers, The Lost Daughter of Happiness bravely unearths the secret fantasies and complex obsessions which pass between races, and between the sexes. With a work which suddenly makes terms like 'sexism' and 'racism' seem oddly quaint, Geling Yan has written the first great post-multicultural novel." - David Henry Hwang, author. "Geling Yan is a courageous and immensely talanted writer. Through a masterful interweaving of history and imagination, she has dared to face down the twin monsters of racism and sexual slavery, exposing both their vulnerability and, alas, their persistence. The result is one of the most unusual love stories I have ever read, in which the paradoxes of the human condition shimmer like threads of gold in a rich brocade." - Aimee Liu, author. "In the late 1860s, a young woman named Fusang is kidnapped from China and sold into prostitution in San Francisco's Chinatown. Chris, her first customer, is twelve years old. For weeks, he has spied on her; now, he meets the object of his obsession and can only gaze at her, stunned by her beauty . The Lost Daughter of Happiness is an epic and moving love story of individuals intoxicated with one another and yet repeatedly separated by prejudice and mistrust. The relationships are full of passion and rage, and the novel chronicles the lives of the main characters over decades against a backdrop of social turmoil - the anti-Chinese hysteria that plagued San Francisco. Fusang is an extraordinary character, both powerul and resigned; Chris finds himself torn between the security of his staid, white world and the sensual allure of hers. And then there is the gangster Da Yong, who is rumored to carry daggers dipped in ancient poison, who wears a ring on every finger, and who sells his naked photograph, which is used as a talisman - evil to ward off evil. He enters Fusang's life with brutal force, but when his world and Chris's eventaully collide, both men turn out to be far different than they seemed. Geling Yan, one of China's most acclaimed novelists, plays with familiar "exotic" imagery, such as bound feet and incense smoke and opium dens, in startling and ironic ways. She creates scenes of intense eroticism that will remind readers of Marguerite Duras's The Lover. She tells a riveting story that is both inevitable and surprising. And she employs a modern narrator who actually speaks to the characters about what has changed in the world - and how much hasn't. Written in a haunting voice that explores the present's bitter truths through the prism of the past. The Lost Daughter of Happiness is a mesmerizing and provocative work of fiction." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps. …