"A River of Stars," by Vanessa Hua

I read journalist/short story writer/novelist Vanessa Hua’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle (my longtime and well-loved “local” newspaper) every week and enjoy it. She writes about San Francisco, family, childhood, culture, ethnicity, gender issues, and much more. She is also the author of a collection of short stories, “Deceit and Other Possibilities,” about which I posted on 2/21/17. Those stories were gripping and somewhat shocking at times; they were different than much of the literature about immigrants, and especially Chinese American immigrants, that I had read before. Now I have read Hua’s next book, her first novel, “A River of Stars” (Ballantine, 2018), which also focuses on Chinese American immigrants, and which paints a detailed and fascinating picture of the lives of the main characters in China, Los Angeles, and – mainly – San Francisco’s Chinatown and surroundings. The main character, Scarlett, has been sent from China to Los Angeles by her boss and lover, Boss Yeung, where she stays at a house for pregnant Chinese women who want their children to become American citizens by reason of birth there. Other characters include Mama Fang, proprietor of that house; Daisy, a teenaged pregnant woman also at the house; Uncle Lo, Boss Yeung’s best friend but also nemesis; Viann, Boss Cheung’s daughter; and a large cast of characters in San Francisco, where Scarlett and Daisy end up in hiding, as a result of complicated events. These characters are vividly drawn, and we care about what happens to them. There are many themes here: the difficulties of immigration to the U.S.; the still inferior role of Chinese women in many ways, especially for those not wealthy; the class system in China; poverty; Chinese men’s desire for sons; the ways that struggling immigrants, new and longtime, both help each other and sometimes distrust each other; the ways that motherhood can transform women’s lives with great love, but also complicate their lives beyond measure; the ways that cultures mix in the U.S. Hua does not beat readers over the head with these themes, but they are very evident at every turn.