On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family
By: Lisa See / Narrated By: Kate Reading
Length: 18 hours and 6 mins
An unconventional family, ESPECIALLY considering the times!
A reviewer over on Audible really, really, REALLY haaaaaated Kate Reading’s narration of On Gold Mountain! I mean LOATHED it, returned the audiobook, got the print copy instead; the whole nine yards.
Was it just me, or is the narration, well, uhm, “just fine and dandy?” I mean, Lisa See looks about as American as it gets, red hair and all, so I wasn’t put off by the reader sounding pretty much 100% American Woman. See comes from a Chinese-American family, but by her telling, and by her time, she’s only about 1/8th Chinese.
Turns out, the See family, hailing from a poor area in China, don’t have too much bad to say about marrying American.
It starts with the patriarch marrying a feisty, tell-it-like-it-is American woman in the early 1900s, a marriage that was not legal given the status of the Chinese at the time, and follows through his sons and daughter making their way in America, feeling oddly excluded from both communities.
I liked the book, as I’m fond of Chinese histories, and the See family often goes back to China for merchant enterprises, buying antiques and buying heirlooms from families in financial distress. They become a powerful family in China, spreading wealth and wisdom around, doing good works. At least the patriarch does. In China, he’s powerful and accepted, as he can never be in America despite his relative wealth. In America, he’s excluded, his children don’t belong anywhere really, despite their American mother encouraging American things and pastimes and encouraging them to speak their minds rather than embracing the filial piety that their father believes is his due. He likes his status so much in China that he takes another wife (ooooh! low!) and starts another family, one who’ll be devoted and dutiful.
Though the audiobook sometimes comes across as a documentary, and Lisa See’s writing has been dinged for not having the beautiful way with words, the rich language of her fictional works, I thought the story was fairly well-crafted, with each of the children being fully fleshed-out people whom I liked very much (though the older boys grew to come off as fairly shallow young men). On Gold Mountain is very much mostly about the patriarch and his children’s early lives and then fliiiiiiiiies through their later years and their deaths. Kinda an abrupt change.
It’s a fascinating book, but I dunno. It made me wanna check out other stories of the lives of Chinese immigrants, of other Chinese-American families, and it really made me wanna check out Lisa See’s fiction to see if her writing really is as glorious as others have said.
All in all, jolly decent but may not be the definitive work I was looking for (I wanted “definitive” cuz I’m lazy that way!).
Plus, no, really! Kate Reading wasn’t awful!!!
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