Dreams of joy
By: Lisa See
Series: May and Pear
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2011
Language: eng
Number of pages: 354
ISBN-13: 9781408822296
Copyright date: 2011
Subjects: Chinese Americans; Fiction; Identification; Birthparents; History
Table of contents: title: It is 1957, and Los Angeles' Chinatown is in the grip of anti-Red sentiment. But eighteen-year-old Joy Louie has bigger problems. Her father Sam has killed himself after being found out to be an illegal immigrant, and she has just discovered that he and her mother Pearl are not her real parents: her real mother is Pearl's glamorous sister May, and her real father is famed Chinese artist Z.G. Li. Angry and confused, Joy leaves home for the only place she can still believe in: Mao's China, where she is determined to find her real father and to be a part of the bold new plans sweeping the nation. When she realises where her daughter has gone, Pearl does the only thing she can: she follows her, even to a country barely recognisable as the land where she grew up with her sister. Now, as Pearl arrives in Shanghai, the city of her childhood, to try to bring her own child home, Chairman Mao launches the Great Leap Forward; title: and Pearl's fate, together with Joy's and the whole nation's, hangs in the balance.