Author: Jiajia Zhang

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…

Not all China dolls are bound to break. Grace, a fugitive from her father’s abuse; Helen, a proper child of an esteemed Chinatown family; and Ruby Tom, a Japanese American  in seek of stardom at the onslaught of World War Two, are an unlikely ensemble. The three girls converge at San Francisco’s Forbidden City Nightclub against their parents’ wishes, in seek of employment as dancers. While the girls find uncanny success in the performing arts scene, war against Japan erupts on the Pacific Front, suddenly…