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The Lost Daughter of Happiness
By Geling Yan
Published by Hyperion East
About the Book | Author | Excerpt |Where to Buy
About the Book
 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 back-drop of social turmoil -- the anti-Chinese hysteria that plagued San Francisco.
Fusang is an extraordinary character, both powerful 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 eventually 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.
About the Author
Geling Yan was born in Shanghai and joined the People's Liberation Army
as a dancer at age twelve. In the late 1970s she began writing as a war correspondent and published her first novel (of five to date) in China in 1985.
In 1989 she left China for the United States and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. Two of her works have been made into
films, including Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, directed by Joan Chen. A collection of her short fiction has been published in English translation. The
Lost Daughter of Happiness is her first novel to be published in English and in other languages worldwide.
Cathy Silber, the translator, teaches Chinese language and literature at
Williams College. She is at work on a book about literature written in nüshu, the Chinese
women's script.
Excerpt
Copyright © 2001 Geling Yan
This is who you are.
The one dressed in red, slowly rising from the creaking bamboo bed, is you. The embroidery on your satin padded jacket must weigh ten catties; the parts
stitched most densely are as hard as ice, or armor. From a distance of one hundred and twenty years, I am amazed by the needlework, so thoroughly beyond me.
Let me raise your chin a bit here, and bring your lips into the dim light. That's it, just right. Now I can see your whole face clearly. Don't worry -- others will
just find exotic the face you consider too square. To the novelty seekers of your day, your every flaw was a distinction.
Now turn around, just like all those times on the auction block. You're used to the auction; that's where pretty whores like you come to know their worth. I
found pictures of those auctions in some books about Chinatown -- dozens of female bodies, totally naked, their beauty in sharp relief against the surrounding gloom.
You're nothing like the other girls on auction. First of all, you lived past twenty. This is a miracle. I looked through all one hundred and sixty of those books
and you were the only one to live so long. The other girls in your line of work started losing their hair at eighteen, their teeth at nineteen, and by twenty, with
their vacant eyes and decrepit faces, they were as good as dead, silent as dust.
But you're nothing like them.
Don't be so eager to show off your feet. I know they're less than four inches long: two mummified magnolia buds. I'll let you show them later. After all,
you're not like that woman who lived at 129 Clay Street from 1890 to 1940 and made her living putting her four-inch golden lotuses on display. Several
thousand tourists a day would shuffle reverently past her door, looking at the way her dead toes had been broken clean under and now curled into the
soles of her feet. Most of them came from the more genteel East Coast, though some even came from the other side of the Atlantic, just to pay
homage to a vestige of antiquity on a real live body. In the deformity and decay of those feet, they could read the Orient.
I know who you were: a twenty-year-old prostitute, one of a succession of three thousand prostitutes from China. When you stepped upon these golden
shores, you were a fully grown woman. You had no skills, no seductive charms, not a trace of lust in your eyes. People could sense your distinctive
simplicity the moment they met you. In an instant, you could make any man feel as if it were his wedding night.
So you were a born prostitute, a good-as-new bride.
Where to Buy
Amazon.com
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