Director of Programs and Education Martha Williams recommends Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang.
Zhang’s beautifully written historical novel begins in 1880s China, where a thirteen-year-old girl named Daiyu’s life is turned upside down by circumstances beyond her control. Her loving parents are mysteriously arrested, her grandmother instructs her to dress as a boy and disappear in the crowded city of Zhifu, and she begins making her own way, completely unprepared for what lies ahead.
In Zhifu, Daiyu begins building a new life as a boy named Feng who cleans a calligraphy school for room and board. Daiyu secretly studies the enchanting characters, and Master Wang notices her hunger for learning. He takes on this new pupil, imparting that…
…calligraphy is “not only about the methods of writing but also cultivating one’s character.”
Daiyu’s time at the school is brief and illuminating. Then one day at the fish market, Daiyu is tricked, kidnapped, and trafficked to the United States by brutal means. She alights in San Francisco, where she is sold to a Chinatown brothel. Daiyu will ultimately escape this entrapment and run away to Idaho. There she will find both new freedoms and new terrors in the mining town of Pierce, while continuing to present herself as a boy, now named Jacob and working in a grocery run by two kind Chinese men.
Daiyu’s saga is heartbreaking. She will endure what many Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in the late 19th century experienced: both invisibility and visible hatred. She is in danger many times throughout the book because of her gender or her nationality, seen by some as a threat to American workers and prosperity. And all Daiyu wants is to return home, to find her family, and to reclaim the safety she once knew.
As she encounters new geographies, caring friends, and those who choose to be foes, Daiyu carries with her the mythology of her name and the calligraphy practice learned from Master Wang. She keeps searching for her own way in an unkind world and for ways to understand the bewildering and sometimes frightening circumstances she finds herself in.
Inspired by a real 1885 event in Pierce, Idaho, Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s masterful novel makes real and vivid the discrimination Chinese people faced leading up to and in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act…
…and the longstanding effects of this law on the landscape of the American West: the violence Chinese people faced from neighbors and once friends, their absence in present-day communities, and the erasure of their contributions to this place.
We selected Four Treasures of the Skys our annual Winter Read, a community-wide read in partnership with valley libraries, to bring attention to this history—our shared history that affects how we live today and offers to inform how we act in the present. More about Winter Read 2025 here.
Join us for Winter Read events throughout the month of February, from speakers to exhibits to book discussions. Zhang will join us for the closing keynote, here at The Community Library on Thursday, February 27, 2025.
Find Four Treasures of the Sky in all formats at The Community Library here.
