Daughter of Fortune
I am an immigrant who ventured across the Pacific Ocean on an Air China Boeing 777 to "take over the economy", or so I have been informed by the media. When I first picked up Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune, a historical fiction regarding the California Gold Rush, I was fifteen and ignorant--a history enthusiast carrying a number of assumptions gathered from the books I had read. I had never considered using a figure of speech so rudely hyperbolic as "taking over the economy," but…