THE LOST DAUGHTER OF HAPPINESS by Gelíng Yan
Translated by Cathy Silber
Hyperion East  -- 2001
ISBN: 0786866543  -- Hardcover
Historical

Reviewed by Jo Rogers, MyShelf.com
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Gelíng Yan, born in China and recently come to the United States, has published her first book in English.  She tells the fictional story of a real person, a Chinese prostitute named Fusang.  Though many of the events mentioned here are real, and did pertain to Fusang, the account, from a distance of more than a hundred years, is fictional.

Fusang was not a prostitute by choice.  She had been told the husband she married by proxy had sent for her, so she boarded the ship with several other Chinese girls.  But they were all being kidnapped and sold into prostitution in San Francisco's Chinatown.  Taller than most Chinese women, Fusang possessed the four inch bound feet that men seemed to find irresistible.  She also possessed great beauty, which later would command high prices.  She refused to sell herself as the others did, though, and for that, she was beaten and auctioned off.

Fusang floated through all the use and abuse without any reaction.  I still wonder if she was mentally retarded or if she was able to separate herself from what was happening to her body as a means of preserving her sanity.  Only God and Fusang will ever know.  But there was one customer who first came to her as a twelve-year-old boy, Chris, that she seemed to love.  His was the only name she remembered.  He was obsessed with her.  THE LOST DAUGHTER OF HAPPINESS is their story, the story of two people who loved each other, but were separated by the boundary of race hatred.  It begs the question, why must people hate races they don't understand?  Why do they not simply learn to understand other races, so they can live together in harmony?
 
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