Excerpt from The Lost Daughter of Happiness by Geling Yan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chris looks at you with the eyes of an addict.





Once upon a time, there was a mountain in China called Tea Mountain, and on that mountain lived a few dozen families of tea growers. They planted tea, they picked tea, they sang Tea Mountain songs--this was the life of a few dozen families, generation after generation. You couldn't call them happy, yet you wouldn't say they suffered either. There was no evil landlord; when the two rich families slaughtered pigs, they always gave a chunk of lard to every household.

Halfway up the mountain lived a family neither poor nor rich, who had enough to eat, whose clothes were patched with no more than two colors. Their fourth daughter was born on the road to Changsha, and the tea buyer there chose a name for her, Fusang.

Fusang was engaged while still in the cradle to an eight- year-old young master from Guangdong. The next year, the young master crossed the ocean to Gold Mountain with some of his uncles in search of gold. Every few years, Fusang received yard goods for clothing or colorful hair ribbons, with word that Young Master had sent them back across the sea for her.

Someone from Young Master's family came two or three times to see Fusang and was pleased to find her slow of mind and speech. Once she married in, they could

From The Lost Daughter of Happiness, copyright (c) 2001, Hyperion Press. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.