Bridge Across the Sky
In 1924, Tai Go, a teenaged boy from China, has reluctantly obeyed his father and boarded a ship to “Gold Mountain”—the United States. There, his father plans for the family to take on the identity of the Lee family, in order to create fictitious family ties to a man who already has legal status in California. In the wake of a San Francisco fire that destroyed countless identity documents, these “paper stories” allow immigrants to shove a foot in the unwelcoming US door.
But first Tai Go, his father, and his grandfather must prove their stories to the American authorities, and while those skeptical authorities evaluate them, they wait, essentially imprisoned, on Angel Island. There, Tai Go meets four people who will change his life: three other migrants (another teen boy, an older man with a revolutionary streak, and a pretty girl interned on the women’s side), and a Black teen working in the kitchen, whom some of the Chinese suspect is a spy for the white authorities. As their paths intersect in first predictable and then surprising ways, Tai Go learns about attraction, loyalty, belonging, and courage.
The free-verse lines of this middle-grade novel streamline the story, making it a propulsive read. Tai Go is a rich character, both believable in his teenaged self-absorption and aspirational in his personal growth. Teens curious about the often cruel history of immigration in the United States will appreciate the intimate look at one family’s experience on Angel Island, and word lovers will revel in the authentic historical poems lifted from the detention center walls and placed in these pages.
