Moreover, Mei Ling soon realises that she’s pregnant. She has Bo to think of, and bright little Siew, an orphaned child who has attached herself to their family. And Mei Ling is no longer responsible just for herself. On arrival, they are sent to Angel Island, the internment camp for new arrivals, where they are checked and interrogated to make sure they are who they claim to be. Yet she will need all the inner strength she can muster for the long voyage in steerage from Hong Kong to San Francisco – separated from her husband and solely responsible for her new stepson, meek little Bo. The problem is that Mei Ling is not a Rabbit: she’s a Dragon, full of force and passion, and she wonders how she can hide her spirit from her husband. But Yu Ling has fallen sick with a severe fever and Mei Ling’s family can’t let this opportunity pass: their other daughter must step into the breach. But nor is she Yu Ling, her elder sister, the woman Kai Li has been expecting and whose horoscope (a Rabbit) was carefully selected to blend with his. She is not Wong Lew She, the dead wife of her husband Kai Li. Mei Ling is actually lying twice over, by necessity.
A tale of resilience, hope and well-meaning deceit, this book looks at the challenges of building a new life in the New World – and stepping into another woman’s shoes. The catch is that Mei Ling must pretend to be the dead wife of her new husband, in order to get through the examination given by US border officials. Now he needs a replacement, and Mei Ling’s family are poor enough and desperate enough to send their daughter to the other side of the world, with a stranger, in the hope of securing a good life for her. A businessman from San Francisco has come home, hoping to take his wife and son back with him, only to find that his wife has recently died. New American immigration laws mean that Chinese workers in the USA can no longer move freely back and forth to their families in the motherland. In March 1923, in a small village in China’s Guangdong Province, young Mei Ling is obliged to take her elder sister’s place in a matchmaking deal. Set largely in San Francisco’s Chinatown, it focuses on the surreptitious custom of the ‘paper wife’, and on one particularly determined and compassionate woman.
This gentle novel throws light on an aspect of history that I knew nothing about.
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