Good Fortune, My Journey to Gold Mountain, by Li Keng Wong; Peachtree Publishers: Atlanta, Georgia, 2006; $14.95 Have you ever read a book that grasps you from the first page and won’t let go until you have finished reading it? Good Fortune, My journey to Gold Mountain, is one of them. You will feel like you are not in this world. You will feel as if you are experiencing Li Keng’s world, and that you are part of the story you read at that moment. I stayed up late to read and was enchanted by what I read. Li Keng Gee, who’s seven years old in the beginning, and who tells the story, is also the author—she is now Li Keng Wong. Mama, Li Hong (Li Keng’s older sister), Lai Wah (their youngest sister) and Li Keng herself, all go to Gold Mountain, what the Chinese called America, on board the SS Hoover to live with Baba. But before they, and the other women as well, are allowed to enter America, they are interrogated by the officials. They are questioned because the American government doesn’t want tons of poor people coming to America, taking up space, and not having enough money to support themselves. If you don’t get all the answers right, you are deported back to China. Also, a Chinese laborer isn’t allowed to bring his wife into the states, so what does Mama do to get to California? She pretends to be Baba’s sister, and so her three daughters start calling Mama “Yee.” Yee means Aunt in Chinese. Once they are in America, they join Baba in his store —an illegal lottery business. Since gambling is against the law, the owners disguise their stores by making them look like clothing stores for example. But every so often, the police find out about a lottery store, and they arrest the owner. This happens to Baba a few times, but he is out of jail soon. Baba’s store is large-ish, so he plans to have the family live there instead of renting another place. Mama gives birth to Nellie, their first child born in America. Then Leslie and Florence come into the family as well. All times, the whole family prays to Quan Yin, the Chinese goddess of Mercy, that she will grant their family a boy Giving birth to a boy means two things: one, the son will carry the family name, and two, he and his wife will take care of his parents when they grow old. So it is good to have a son, and the Chinese culture still believes in it. When Mama gives birth to William, they are all happy to finally have a boy. The tradition of wanting a boy is still important in China because of the one-child policy I was born in China, and I don’t like the policy Even though China’s one-child policy is supposed to prevent overpopulation, I hate it that parents have to abandon their babies. This is common: if Chinese families give birth to a girl, they keep the girl and try for a son. If the next child is a girl (probably me), they abandon the newest baby in some busy place, and try again for a son. Some of the baby girls who are abandoned are adopted and come to America. Li Keng and I both came to America for a better life. Good Fortune is a great book! The words are beautifully woven together, and the way Wong shares her childhood in this book is amazing. I highly recommend it to all who are ages eight and up. I loved this book, and I hope you all do too. Mallory Xiaohe McFarland, 10New York, New York
March/April 2007
Diamond Sky
A ski day means up at dawn. Dozy, half-awakening, drifting in and out of dreams. The flannel is warm, and the mattress is cloudy soft. But it’s up, sliding out of the billowy world of down blankets and fleecy comforters. Feet scrunch on the thick creamy carpet, hands reach for that glass of water you never finished last night. You sip it, slowly, in the dusky corner of the blue-and-teak room where the world is hovering between dusk and dawn. You gaze out at the pines, the softly falling snow, and the moose tracks like a finger drawn through icing. The room is dark and quiet, and the chair by the window is cold. Feet curl under, and cardinal birds flap in your stomach like it is Christmas. Your hair, morning-messy, falls over one shoulder. It’s too early to think or do or say. This is the time to sit and sip and look out at the awakening world. This is the time for blue-and-teak quiet. The snow ceases to fall, and now it’s gray, but more like the English gray Gray like a gull’s wing, gray with snow waiting to fall. And you hate to leave the chair by the window, hate to acknowledge the fact that it’s five AM and you aren’t sleeping, but you have to. So you slip on a sweatshirt, open the door to let in a slice of the rest of the house, a slice big enough for you to slip out. You walk across honey-wood floors in the kitchen, turn on the lights. Your sister Grace pops out from the pantry making you jump. “Never. Do. That. Again. Before. Eight AM.” “What’re you doing up?” your sister asks. She knows perfectly well, but she also knows that you are incapable of full sentences before io:3o in the morning during vacation. Nu don’t know why or how or when you’ll get home but for now all you need is this “Too. Early Lemme alone. Pop-Tarts. To pop. Shoes. To buy Places to ski. Move.” She moves. Strawberry Pop-Tarts are sweet and sugary in your hand, warm and golden from the toaster. You eat them your special way, peeling the icing off, licking the jam. Gross, but otherwise it’s bad luck. Doesn’t everyone know that? The kitchen begins to hum, and it’s still too early to talk, and you know people will tease and make fun of your inanimate self if you stay So you go, curling up on the stairs, which is very strange, but it’s too early to care. And then, when the gray gray sky begins to let down the snow again, people—girls—get ready Ski boots and ski pants and parkas. Masks, which you never wear because you managed to actually find a cute ski hat in Teton Village last week, which is amazing. Soon you are in the garage, dressed and warm and with both gloves on, and you have no idea how you got there. You open your mouth to object, but someone—your older sister Lindsay—crams a scarf around your neck. You sadly realize that the cute hat is not on your own head, but when you begin to speak, you get a mouthful of red wool. So you kick Lindsay, and she kicks you back, but gently, because she is seventeen, and it’s time for ski boots, ski poles, cross country skis. Someone complains about you being so still, but you don’t care as long as boots are on your feet and skis are on the boot and you actually have ski poles and you know today is ski day Ski Day, talked about all your life, always secret, but today you find out, because it is the holidays, and the day before Christmas Eve, and yesterday was your thirteenth birthday “Hush! Hush!” The whispers circle around the drafty concrete garage, and boots stamp and your toes tingle. Grace and Lindsay and all the other cousins, aunts, moms, veterans of this. But for you—it is new, it is new, and you’re beginning to wake up, and the cardinals in your stomach flutter once or twice. And you feel sorry for your sister Mimi, only ten years old, stuck in bed, but that was you all your life. Until now. And the garage door opens. Creaky, groaning, will it break? One by one the figures file out, and when it is your turn excitement is salty on your lips. Skis slip from garage to snow, and you tilt your face up to the pink-and-gray sky, and the gray snow, and you laugh out loud, and it is like a baptism, pure and sacred and holy, snow on your face and shoulders, snowflakes melting on the black leather gloves. And because you can’t help yourself, you catch one on your tongue, and the cold shocks. And you are fully, fully awake, for the first time in your life at 6:30 AM, because how could you not be? You follow everyone, side-slipping down the steep side of the driveway She wasn’t supposed to, but Grace, fifteen and competitive and a downhill skier, has been taking you outside ever since the snow started in November, teaching you how. You hear her voice in your head, “Side, Sophie, side and back, skis straight, hold—do it right! Don’t embarrass me!” and you do it right, and Grace turns her blond head around to wink one brown eye. “Good job, Soph!” Lindsay catches on, the wink is obvious, but Queen Linds just laughs and holds her head higher. You ski all day, across rivers and down trails and forging the trails on vast expanses of plains where you pick wildflowers in the summer. The world is different, transformed, under this mantle of powdery white, and it has been for two months but you have been too busy to notice. But now you do, and your breath is shallow. You are awed, aware of the sacred, quiet, still, pure beauty, and you want to shout. You
The Canal Towpath Near Sand Island on a September Afternoon
A solitary autumn leaf rustles on a tree. Slowly, gracefully it floats down, twirling, silently meeting the dense dappled shimmer of still water. Overhead, distant vees of geese appear. Their faint raucous cries float on a soft breeze. Sticks weave around rocks to form warm tables where turtles sunbathe languidly Dragonflies swoop and hover like sylphs admiring their likenesses in the mirroring water. Lithe water striders skate across the skin of the canal. Schools of sinuous minnows flit like brown shadows below. Salamanders crawl over the slippery logs submerged under thick algae and creep away The green lacewings buzz perpetually among the reeds. Swamp roses clustered by the bank sway delicately in clumps of switchgrass. Mingled jewelweed and loosestrife nod to passersby People fish, jog, ride bicycles, alone or in couples or in families. I trudge on the dusty path past a child casting a line into the hazy water. He pulls a fish flipping and gasping from the murky depths. The child’s father congratulates him, and the fish’s life slips away Soda cans, rusty metal shards, plastic bottles, old tires are strewn among the brambles. The transfixing image doubles itself on the water, distorted here and there by a dead branch hovering low or a grimy plastic bag caught in weeds at the water’s edge. The placid mirror reflects it all. The river flows on, around snarls of fallen trees trailing skeletal gray fingers in the water. Two boys doubling on a single bike, one on the handlebars, ride by me. Their heads swivel to stare. They mutter something harsh. Cars judder over the looming bridge like distant thunder. Rory Lipkis, 9Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
