While living and working in Pierce, Daiyu meets the romantic hero of the novel: Nelson Wong, the American-born son of a Chinese father, a gifted violinist and teacher. Here too, Zhang breaks the conventional expectation; the budding love between Daiyu and Nelson is stifled by his belief that she is a man. Zhang deftly evokes the personal price of Daiyu’s disguise: “I’ve learned to hide my natural reactions, my tendency to laugh at little things that mesmerized me, to instead tackle things with brevity and deliberateness, not tenderness.” Unable to touch Nelson while watching him sleep, Daiyu locates her desire in a memory: “I once wanted a fish from the fish market. I wanted it so badly that I couldn’t see anything else, only feel the satisfaction of it slithering down my throat. I craved nothing more than the fullness to come, the heat of the food.”
Throughout the novel, Zhang adopts a stylistic tic of avoiding contractions. The unavoidable formality of this apparatus is offset by its exuberant prose, but it hinders its dialogue with a generic rigidity that undermines the diversity and individuality of speakers. This weakness becomes more pronounced in the latter half of the novel, when Daiyu and her shopkeeper allies — and eventually Nelson — clash with the rattling racism and mistrust of their white neighbors. The root causes of white enmity will be all too familiar to today’s readers: economic competition, distrust of cultural differences, and the virulent desire for a scapegoat. “I’m starting to realize that in this place called Idaho, which they call the West, being Chinese can be like a disease,” Daiyu said. “I am something they cannot fathom. I’m something they’re afraid of. We are all.” America’s current wave of violent attacks on Asian Americans is an embarrassing reminder of how little distance we have traveled in more than a century.
As tragedy unfolds, Daiyu’s longing for home and her desire to belong are heartbreaking to read about. “There’s a difference between being a newcomer to a city and being in a world that’s nothing like you, that reminds you of your strangeness every moment,” she recalls. “This is what Idaho is to me. And so, when our Chinese customers come to ask for millet and buy green onions, licorice and cinnamon, I look at them tenderly and follow their movements. I miss you, and I don’t know you once, I want to say to the miner, the money launderer, the clerk.”
In an author’s note after the story ends, Zhang explains that she based the Idaho portion of her novel on a historical atrocity. The resonance and immediacy of these barbaric 19th-century events testify to Zhang’s storytelling power and should serve as a warning to all of us.
Jennifer Egan is the author, most recently, of “The Candy House.”
FOUR TREASURES OF HEAVEN
By Jenny Tinghui Zhang
326 pp. Flatiron Books. $27.99.