A Map of Paradise

by Linda Ching Sledge

Overview

The acclaimed author of Empire of Heaven, called by the New York Times "a Chinese Gone With the Wind," now creates a richly told immigrant saga of ninteenth-century Hawaii.

With its green cliffs and silvery waterfalls, Hawaii offers radiant hope to Rulan and Pao An--exiles from Chinese tyranny, immigrants with the will to succeed despite hardship and prejudice and enemies from their homeland.  But this proud couple's hardest struggle will be with their own child--Mulan, called Molly.  Born in Hawaii's sacred hills, Molly grows to despise the old Chinese ways.  Locked in perpetual combat with her new parents, she is drawn into a dangerous love affair with a glamorous but decadent poet, a protege of the king.  And even as the family's fortunes rise, Molly's mother watches in sorrow, fearing that her child will realize too late that happiness lies far closer to home.

Beautifully told, A Map of Paradise  offers the colorful sweep of history with the satisfaction of characters intimately revealed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780553378900
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/01/1997
Pages:	402
Product dimensions:	6.03(w) x 8.91(h) x 1.11(d)

Read an Excerpt

"Fusan.  The Blessed Isles on the rim of the eastern sea," the ragged soldier announced to the woman who had ceased to believe in paradise.  "The greenest one will be our home."

A wind was stirring the clouds above the bay, and the air smelled of salt and monsoon.  Crickets in the reeds kept up a rapid report, warning of rain.  About them in caves burned the fires of other hunger-marchers like themselves, peasants driven by famine, drought, and war toward the southern-most ports of Kwangtung Province as the great peasant rebellion sputtered and died.

Pao An and Rulan had come on foot, hundreds of miles from Nanking, the ruined rebel capital, to this makeshift shelter in the barren hills above Hong Kong bay.  There was no place left in China to which an escaped concubine and a peasant general with a price on his head could run.  "Except the Blessed Isles," Pao An insisted.

"You're a fool to believe the lies that poets tell," Rulan said bitterly.  "I believed in dream kingdoms when we went to war.  Nothing will make me believe again."

"Fusan  is real," Pao An insisted.  "Men from Kwangtung knew those isles long before the bak kuei white devils claimed them.  We sailed along those shoals and mingled our blood with the dark people there.  Only when the empire closed itself to the world did we forget that lucky place." He began to draw a crude map in the dirt with his fingers.

Rulan watched the firelight blaze up in his eyes.  Surely this battle-scarred soldier did not believe Fusan, the lost paradise of legend, existed! Surely he was inventing a haven for a woman who had traveled rivers clogged with corpses, seen village after village laid waste by war...

"Some say that Fusan is California, the mountain where Tang men dig for gold," he went on in a rush.  He stabbed at the dirt, creating islands with pebbles and sand.  "But I believe the Blessed Isles lie closer, in the heart of the eastern ocean, the place sailors call 'Hawaii.' A man can rebuild there.  Trade his labor for cash."

"Not Hawaii!" Rulan declared, understanding immediately the price he intended to pay for paradise.  "Not where Tang men make themselves slaves cutting cane."

"You sell your labor, not your life! A few years' sweating in the cane fields--then you are free to reap the riches of those islands! No village headman to order you here and there.  No imperial official to put a cangue around your neck for not bending low enough.  A new earth for people without home or village or clan--"

"But we have old enemies there! What about the man and woman who still own me? What if the magistrates of that place force me back to them and put you in chains?"

They sat in silence awhile, each turned away from the other--until she moved closer, pulling him down so he might seek only the paradise that her body could bestow.  His lovemaking, always ardent, seemed more reckless than before; and afterward, he slept as though slain.  She lay beside him, watching the fire die slowly away.  A log burst in a shower of sparks, rekindling a flame in the midst of the embers.

At sunrise, Rulan was roused by a whirring of wings.  A bird with a golden crown and scarlet feathers leaped across her line of vision to the top of a nearby thornbush.  Even wrapped in slumber, she recognized it: the crimson bird, the herald of good fortune.  Comforted by the omen, she put her face into the warmth of Pao An's neck and gave herself up to sleep.

When she awoke again, there was no bird, no man beside her.  Only the marks of his fingers in the dirt mapping imaginary islands floating in a phantom sea.

Editorial Reviews

Chinese family saga meets coming-of-age novel in this sweeping sequel to Empire of Heaven set in 19th-century Hawaii. Former rebel general Pao An is now a gu li (coolie laborer) in California. His lover, the warrior-woman Rulan, is in Oahu, where she gives birth to their child, Molly. When, after seven years, the three are reunited, the meeting is rocky. Molly scorns all things Chinese, Pao An rejects all things American and the family must face both bullying by brutish tongs from China and oppression resulting from Hawaiian anti-immigrant laws. But Pao An and Rulan's fierce entrepreneurial ambitions mesh with the changes in their new land. Hawaii's weak monarchy is falling prey to increasingly powerful sugar and trade interests, and Hawaiians are dying from foreign diseases. Molly, walking a tightrope between the old and the new, finally finds her way home in the bittersweet aftermath of her affair with a half-Hawaiian freedom fighter. Sledge is a strong new voice in historical fiction. Her clean, straightforward style eschews overheated dialogue, while her vivid characters, exotic locale and dedicated interest in Chinese-American history recall both James Michener and Amy Tan. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Set in Hawaii and California in the late 1800s, Sledge's second novel is a sequel to Empire of Heaven (LJ 4/15/90). Reemerging in this work are two Chinese exiles, Rulan and her husband, Pao An, who have now left Hong Kong with the intention of rebuilding their lives in Hawaii, the land they assume is paradise. But after Pao An sells himself as a coolie in exchange for passage, misfortune separates the couple. Rulan is left alone and pregnant in Hawaii while in California Pao An struggles to find his way back to his wife. Steeped in historical detail, Sledge's work reads like an epic, complete with fully developed characters. Her narrative is lush, giving readers a true sense of the period. Glossaries of Hawaiian and Chinese terms are included at the end of the book. Recommended for larger historical and romantic fiction collections.Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Garden Grove, Cal.

Library Journal

Unusual historical accuracy distinguishes an otherwise formulaic novel of a plucky Chinese family: a portrait of Tang immigrants, on whose backs so much of the infrastructure of California and Hawaii was built.

Sledge's second (Empire of Heaven, 1990) opens as peasant general Pao An and his warrior wife Rulan, an escaped concubine, flee a failed Taiping rebellion by signing on as indentured servants for the sugarcane plantations of Hawaii. But Pao An is shipped instead to California, spending the next seven years building the dikes that tamed the Sacramento Delta floodplains, becoming witness to nature's awesome calamities and the even worse cruelties of racist white settlers. Rulan has an easier time as a much-loved servant in Hawaii for a patrician but childless New England minister and his wife, whose love for Rulan's daughter, Molly, provides a surprising plot twist: On Pao An's return, Molly will hate him for forcing the little family to live in Chinatown's cramped poverty. She also hates her father's orphan-boy companion, Lin Kong, tormenting him every chance she gets—which, of course, means that the two are destined for each other. Throughout, Sledge delivers tremendous set-pieces—a killer flood in California, a dizzy soiree between King Kalakaua and Robert Louis Stevenson on the King's yacht, a nuanced look at the still-controversial annexation of Hawaii by US sugar planters—even though the characters here sometimes have trouble catching their breath while jogging through fires, hurricanes, Tong warfare, love affairs, and economic ups and downs.

A superior work of history, then, with some genuinely affecting moments among its fictional characters—and a demonstration of how much of the West was East in the rambunctious Manifest Destiny days of the late 19th century.

Kirkus Reviews