Good Fortune

March 1, 2006
Gr. 4-7. As a young girl growing up in a Chinese village, Wong didn't remember her father, who sent money from his U.S. home. Then Baba gathers enough funds to bring his family to "Gold Mountain" with him, and together with her mother and sister, Wong prepares for the interrogation at Angel Island. In this briskly narrated memoir, Wong recounts her family's journey from their Chinese village to Oakland, California's Chinatown during the 1930s. The telling is straightforward, even stiff in places, but the vivid cultural details, though not always smoothly inserted, are fascinating, whether Wong is describing her mother's traditional wedding or the family's first apartment in California, where her father coped with the Depression by running a gambling business in the family's front room. The plain words leave room for readers to imagine their own emotional responses as Wong wonders about her faraway father, lies to immigration officials, and tries to help her family stay afloat. For other portraits of Chinese immigration, suggest Paul Yee's story collection, " Dead Man's Gold" (2000), for slightly older readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)