Four Treasures of the Sky: The compelling debut about identity and belonging in the 1880s American West

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Four Treasures of the Sky tells the story of Daiyu, who is brought to America against her will and forced to hide who she is even as she grows into her true self.

The altering identities often serve to examine power structures around gender binaries, such as how men (particularly white men) seem to have access to violence while society looks the other way as long as it is directed at someone socially deemed beneath them (by race, class, or if they are a woman). Zhang’s beautiful, limpid prose penetrates surfaces to illuminate the shadows or currents beneath without self-consciousness, the mark of excellent literary fiction…Brilliant. When disaster strikes and she is kidnapped, she is dispatched to San Francisco and into a new world of suffering and growth. The novel does seem to avoid any relationship towards trans identities, in case you were looking for that, or any queer aspects as well.

Born to a family of tapestry merchants, her happy childhood is interrupted when at the age of twelve her parents suddenly disappear. She escapes but racism and discrimination by the white man follow her and the Chinese population across the west. I cannot get over how brilliant the prose is throughout, and just how vivid the story comes to life.

Reading in-depth about the Chinese Exclusion Act, its history behind it, and what the Chinese immigrants went through was a big eye-opener for me.Lin Daiyu is a girl named after a tragic romance heroine in perhaps a significant foreshadowing of Daiyu’s own fate. When I am kidnapped, I am thirteen and standing in the middle of the Zhifu fish market on Beach Road, watching a fleshy woman assemble whitefish the shape of spades into a pile. Content warnings: rape, human trafficking, forced prostitution, sexual assault, physical assault, kidnapping, hanging, murder, gunshots, racism, hate crimes. and i am so grateful for JTZs father for wanting such a story, because i had no idea how much i wanted it, too.

I had not known about the plight of girls and women who were kidnapped and sent to America to work in brothels. This story is a bildungsroman, a 19th-century Chinese girl's journey into adulthood, and her struggle to become the best person she can be at a time when being a girl was a burden in itself. Another domino subsequently falls when Daiyu is kidnapped at the fish market by a dangerous Chinese gang. The inkstone asks for destruction before creation,’ Daiyu tells us, ‘ You must first destroy yourself, grind yourself into a paste, before becoming a work of art. Based loosely on a true event it is really difficult to explain how good it is without any spoliers.Incredibly good writing which kept me so interested, I barely slept for the 2-3 days it took me to finish it. This book hurt to read, but it hurts more to know that mainstream American education just omits so much of our worst doings. 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. Daiyu is a wonderful and beautiful character who throughout her journey never really loses her sense of hope and wonder or her ability to love and be kind even when faced with the worst of people. Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak.

The writing is persuasive and lyrical and Daiyu's account of learning English is exquisite, but the narrative does sometimes threaten to overwhelm the reader's ability to suspend disbelief. With that background, the novel touches on kidnapping, sexual slavery, sexual assault, the loss of family, hiding identities, found family, and racism on all ends of the spectrum.This story focuses on the exploitation, racism, and segregation that the Chinese community faced after traveling all this way to a supposed land of hope. Set in the late 1800s this book follows a young girl who is kidnapped from China and smuggled to America where she is forced to adopts many different personas as a way to survive. A series of cruel misadventures buffets Zhang’s protagonist, a Chinese teenager named Daiyu, from a comfortable, loving childhood into this unstable American milieu.