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In 1867, Lisa See's great-great-grandfather arrived in America, where he prescribed herbal remedies to immigrant laborers who were treated little better than slaves. His son Fong See later built a mercantile empire and married a Caucasian woman, in spite of laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Lisa herself grew up playing in her family's antiques store in Los Angeles's Chinatown, listening to stories of missionaries and prostitutes, movie stars and Chinese baseball teams.
With these stories and her own years of research, Lisa See chronicles the one-hundred-year-odyssey of her Chinese-American family, a history that encompasses racism, romance, secret marriages, entrepreneurial genius, and much more, as two distinctly different cultures meet in a new world.
Excerpt
Reader's Guide
First published in 1995. Reprinted by Vintage in 2012
"Lovingly rendered. ... A vivid tableau of a family and an era." - People
"Terrific stuff. ... The See family's adventures would be incredible if On Gold Mountain were fiction." - The New York Times Book Review
"Weaves together fascinating family anecdotes, imaginative details, and the historical details of immigrant life. ... Enviably entertaining." - Amy Tan
"Astonishing. ... as engagingly readable as any novel. ... comprehensive and exhaustively researched." - Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[A] striking piece of social history made immediate and gripping." - Publishers Weekly
"Although her mesmerizing family history starts out by tracing the accomplishments of a poor peasant trained as an herbalist, it goes on to celebrate the resourcefulness and often quite formidable achievements of generations of family members up to the present day." - Booklist
This information about On Gold Mountain was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of The Island of Sea Women, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, Shanghai Girls, China Dolls, and Dreams of Joy, which debuted at #1. She is also the author of On Gold Mountain, which tells the story of her Chinese American family's settlement in Los Angeles. See was the recipient of the Golden Spike Award from the Chinese Historical Association of Southern California and the Historymaker's Award from the Chinese American Museum. She was also named National Woman of the Year by the Organization of Chinese American Women.
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