Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Flatiron Books)

“Practice erasing and overturning and re-creating the self until all I have to do is disappear.”

Daiyu has been doing this all of her life. Born to parents who named her after a doomed woman in an ancient story, she is a loved and cherished little girl until the day her parents disappear. Her beloved grandmother tells the twelve-year-old girl that she too must vanish, so the captors of her parents won’t come back to take her away. Cutting Daiyu’s hair and dressing her in the clothing of a boy, her grandmother gives her a boy’s name, Feng, and sends her off to a distant city. 

As Feng, Daiyu becomes a boy, finds work as a calligraphy master’s servant, and begins to learn the characters on her own. The Four Treasures of the Study become her implements: the inkbrush, inkstone, inkstick, and paper, and she’s taken on as an after-hours student at the master’s school. One day, while exploring the city streets alone, she falls into the hands of a stranger who drugs her, puts her in a dark room, and holds her prisoner for almost a year. During that time, an old woman comes every day to teach her English and when she has learned enough, her abductor covers her body with tar and stuffs her into a basket filled with coal. “You’re going to America, to a place called San Francisco. If anyone asks, tell them you came from New York.”

But nobody asks. Instead the girl is taken from the ship as soon as it docks, is stripped naked, put into a barracoon, and is quickly purchased by a Chinese brothel owner. She’s given a new name, Peony, and eventually is assigned her first customer, a young boy who helps her to escape.

Once again her hair is cut, she’s dressed in men’s clothing, and is given papers that declare she is Jacob Li. Taken to Idaho where Chinese labor is needed, Jacob Li lives there for three years, never once betraying his true identity. Working for two Chinese shopkeepers,  Jacob struggles with his attraction to a young Chinese man who teaches the violin. The only feminine part of Jacob is the ghost of the woman with whom the girl he once was allowed to be shares a name. Lin Daiyu’s spirit is sheltered within the body of Jacob Li, as hidden as Daiyu herself.

Then the violence begins, with the white townspeople united against the Chinese residents, and suddenly “being Chinese is something like a disease.” When the Rock Springs Massacre is reported in the Idaho newspapers, a tragedy begins to unfold and a story that has the tinges of a romance novel becomes an account of terrible history.

In 2014, Zhang says in an author’s note, her father was driving through a town in Idaho where he saw a sign that said a “Chinese Hanging” once took place there. Five Chinese men accused of murdering a white store owner had been strung up by a mob of vigilantes. Later Zhang began to research the facts behind this brief account. The more she learned, the more she “wanted to tell the story, not just of the five Chinese who were hanged, but of everything--the laws, tactics, and complicity that enabled this event and so many others.”

Through Daiyu, Zhang tells this story in the form of a fable anchored in history. Through her different names and selves, Daiyu embodies the Chinese women who were forced into American brothels, the Chinese men who looked for work under identities that were not their own, the Chinese business owners who were forced to leave everything they had painstakingly built, the Chinese who faced death at the hands of white mobs. 

Four Treasures of the Sky is a smart and compelling novel that’s almost impossible to put down. Once it’s finished, it clings on, with sorrow and a terrible unveiling of whitewashed truths.~Janet Brown