Chasing Down the Moon
The many heartbreaks of human trafficking and the systematic racism on which many American frontier towns were built form the backdrop of the plot of Carla Baku’s well-designed and emotionally charged debut novel.
In 1883, Ya Zhen, a young woman from China’s mountainous Hunan province, is sold by her father to slave-traders who eventually bring her to boom-town San Francisco, where she’s set to work as a prostitute in the small town of Eureka, California. Once there, she finds a surprising number of townspeople who are sympathetic to her plight and the plight of immigrants like her, including a strong-willed woman named Rose Allen, who understands the racism of the day with bitter clarity because she’s in love with a Chinese shopkeeper. Baku shapes the resulting clash between the town’s entrenched intolerance and the striving of a small group of its citizens for understanding in a broader social context, and although the story can sometimes yield to forced moralizing, there’s a genuine power in Ya Zhen’s story, and Baku captures that power mainly through the well-researched believability of her book’s setting.
A strong and unflinching read.
