1882,China; Daiyu is twelve years old when her parents dissapear. She lives with her grandmother, who warns her that one day, the people who captured her parents, will come for her too. Her grandmother forces her to leave for the city of Zhifu, disguised with a shaved head as a boy named Feng. Now, Daiyu has to survive on her own.
She becomes a help for a calligraphy master, but shortly after she is kidnapped at the fish market, and after being held captive for a year where she is thaught English, she is smuggled in a crate and shipped to San Francisco, where she starts to live as a girl again, but that makes her land in the dangerous brother of Madame Lee, which by daytime is a laundry shop. Daiyu becomes the prostitute Peony here, and Madame Lee forces her to spend her first ''real work night'' with a man who is important in the most important tong (the Chinese mafia) that protects the brothel. This totally goes different as planned, and it lands Daiyu fleeing the brothel secretly and makes her land in a mining town of Pierce Idaho, where Daiyu, as many other Chinese, finds work in a Chinese general store as a boy again, named Jacob Li, where she becomes good friends with the two owners. But the Chinese are met with agressive and violent racist mobs who want the Chinese workers in quite verbal slur words ''to go back to their country'. This leads all to very tragic events, where Daiyu and her fellow workers at the store are accused of a murder they didn't commit..
This is a beautiful and tragic book that is truly moving. I found it sad to read in the afterword, that the racist events that took places in the book, truly happened in history. How the book is written, it is absolutely breathtaking and beautiful. The author did a great job to make the events that took place in a different era, understandable and easy to follow as a reader. The characters where brilliant, and Daiyu is a true heroine. She has to undergo many hardships from early age on, and during the book you just get deep respect for her, as her hardships in life never seems to stop, but she never gives up. The end was truly one that gives you cold chills, I really found it scary, and I truly hoped Daiyu and her two friends would come out alive.. I truly found it heartbreaking how racist some people where against Chinese people, against the backdrop of the awful Chinese Exclusion Act, something I will never understand. I find books like this very important to show parts in history that are rarely or never told.
Overall, this is a very good and very original book, with an amazing storyline and characters that I highly recommend!
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