Excerpt from The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He patted it now, as he finally turned to take in the scenery?- the pale halo of sere grass along a ridge, the stiff flame of a cypress, the veiled peaks beyond?- wondering despite himself if the mountains might glister through the flickering pines.

2.

Gold Mountain. Gum Shan. Ling had never even laid eyes on gold before he left Fragrant Harbor. It had made him feel furtively foolish. There he was, sent to find it and he'd never seen it in his life. What if he didn't recognize it? How yellow was it? How heavy? What if he walked right by it? "How can you miss it, lah!" Aunty Bao had snapped, over the snick of her abacus. "There'll be a mountain of it, stupid egg!" But Ling wasn't so sure. They came from Pearl River. If it were really full of pearls, he wanted to tell her, he wouldn't be sailing to Gold Mountain.

"Besides," Big Uncle insisted, "you have seen gold before." They were in his cabin on the "flower boat," the moored junk that housed the brothel Big Uncle owned and Aunty Bao?- palely plump as the pork buns she was named after?- managed for him. Yes, Big Uncle was saying, a grandfather had made his fortune prospecting in Nanyang. The old man had had a mouthful of gold teeth. As an infant, Ling had even been given gold tea, a concoction made by pouring boiling water over a piece of gold, supposed to ensure luck. Didn't he remember? Ling tried. For a second a vast, bared smile, glistening wetly, rose up before him and with it a feeling of fear, an impression, as the lips drew back, that beneath the flesh the man himself was made all of gold, that behind the gold teeth lay a gold tongue clanging in a gold throat. But the only "grandfather" he could actually recall was a broken-down old head swabbing the decks who had already lost those teeth, pulled, one by one, to pay for his opium habit. All that was left was a fleshy hole, the old man's lips hanging loose as an ox's, his tongue constantly licking his bruised-looking gums.

Still, Big Uncle pressed, "Gold is in your blood, boy!"

Perhaps, Ling thought, but he'd learned to doubt his blood.

His people were of that reviled tribe of sea gypsies known as Tanka, "egg folk," after the rounded rattan shelters of their sampans. Forbidden by imperial edict to live on land and only grudgingly tolerated in ports and coastal villages, for generations they'd made a thin living as fishermen, mocked for their stink by the Han Chinese. Latterly they'd made an even more odious, if also more lucrative, reputation smuggling opium for the British and pimping out their women to them for good measure. Ling's mother had been one of these haam-sui-mui, or "saltwater girls." "A lucky one," Aunty Bao observed with a moue of envy, a beauty plucked from the brothel.

Excerpted from The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies. Copyright © 2016 by Peter Ho Davies. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.