"Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience. Inhabiting four lives--a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor; Hollywood's first Chinese movie star; a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes the Asian American community; and a biracial...

Aisling Juanjuan Shen was born to illiterate peasants in a tiny farming hamlet in China's Yangtze Delta in 1974. Pronounced useless by her parents because she wasn't good at planting rice, she became the first person from her village ever to attend college. After graduating with a teaching degree, the government assigned her to a remote and low paying job that she was expected to hold for the rest of her life. But she wasn't satisfied-and she bought...