Candlelight Bridge
At Christmas time in 1910, twelve-year-old Candelaria and her family leave their village in Mexico. They plan to walk north for weeks to Juarez and then sneak across the border into America. Bandit gangs and federal soldiers have made life hell for poor locals in Mexico, especially able-bodied boys and men. About the same time in China, twenty-year-old Yan Chi Wong has suffered the brutal loss of the woman he was to marry. Shunned for a series of foolish decisions he made trying to save her, Yan Chi flees to his brother in America. This work then plays out over the next 24 years, awash in the tides of racism, the Depression, plagues, the Great War, and Prohibition.
Candelaria’s family and Yan Chi separately find their way to El Paso, Texas. Candelaria soon waits on tables at Yan Chi’s restaurant. They marry, raise children, and strive to find a decent place in a world that’s dangerous and often does not want them. Yan Chi, clever in business, is both charming and cruel. Candelaria struggles every day to do what’s right for herself and others who depend on her, including her constantly pregnant mother, her disabled father, and younger siblings.
Lopez Lee does not shy away from intense details of a sandstorm, death and dying, forced sex, a difficult birth, gun fights and even a child-scarring coyote. The literary prose delves into the innermost thoughts and secrets of the main characters. Many subplots contain surprising twists and turns right up to a cluster of life-changing decisions at the very end. Readers wanting to be transported to those harrowing times and places for immigrants from China and Mexico will appreciate this story.
