Four Treasures of the Sky reads like an epic. It is a story to get swept up in, an odyssey that will take you from the fish markets of China to the underground brothels of San Francisco to the mining towns of Idaho. Our journey begins with the most jarring first sentence this reader has ever encountered: “When I am kidnapped, it does not happen in an alleyway.” 

This is Daiyu. She is thirteen years old. As in many fairytales, her family has gifted her with protections, of sorts. From her grandmother, she has understood what it is to care for living things in their garden. From her mother, a revered tapestry maker, she has learned how to be good with her hands. From her father, she has gained a cunning, agile mind. Theirs was a house full of love and stories—the same thing, really. She grew up on cautionary tales, legends of tragic heroines who died beautiful and young. Her parents had plucked her name from one of those myths: the sad story of Lin Daiyu, whose misfortune was falling in love with a boy born on a higher rung of the social ladder. His family disapproved of the match, and on his wedding day, they disguised their preferred daughter-in-law as his one true love. Once Lin Daiyu discovered the plan, she fell terribly ill; her lungs filled with blood, and she died. 

Why name your daughter after the tragic heroine of this story? It’s a question our narrator carries with her throughout the novel, just as she carries the spirit of Lin Daiyu, which comes to life in her mind, often chastising her for her decisions. Our Daiyu vows never to be so weak. Every time she comes up against seemingly insurmountable hardship (and it is often), she blames her fate on her namesake.

The first hardship strikes unexpectedly, when her parents have disappeared. Her grandmother sends her away to Zhifu, a nearby town where she hopes there will be opportunity. Miraculously, in an almost Dickensian fashion, Daiyu finds herself at the doorstep of a calligraphy master. She is hired to clean the school but quickly discovers her passion for the art form. It is here, in these few happy days, that Daiyu learns to write—which is to say: it is here that Daiyu is given the tools with which to tell her story. 

A lot of what our hero learns from Master Wang is that to truly master the art of calligraphy is to understand yourself. Calligraphy isn’t just about writing characters but cultivating your own. The intention behind every stroke matters: “This is the kind of person you can become, Master Wang told his students, the kind who approaches the world as a blank sheet of paper every time.” Our hero decides: “I would become someone who did not bend to the will of fate and the stories she was named after, but instead a person all her own, with a legacy that was hers.”

It is at this crucial point that Daiyu is kidnapped at the fish market, lured away by a member of one of the most dangerous Chinese gangs. Her destiny has been decided for her once again: she is locked in a dark room and will be sold to a brothel in America. In times of distress, Daiyu traces Chinese characters with her fingers:

“The character for black is made up of mouth, fire, and earth. Mouth sits on top of Earth. Earth’s tip bisects mouth. Underneath both, fire […] I trace black with my finger, and even though I cannot see it, I know that this time, I have finally written it the way it was meant to be written. Black, or the way time disappears and something else suspends in its place. The way of being alone.”

Some of the most beautiful passages of this book come from Zhang’s poignant and poetic understanding of the roots of Chinese characters. At a later point, she shares: “You cannot write fire without also including the character for person. Fire is a person trapped between two flames.” 

There is an incredible parallel between the way Daiyu picks apart the definition of each stroke in a character and the way she herself is composed of a litany of new identities. This a story about nested significance, about the way meaning builds on itself. Four Treasures of the Sky is a story about the sum of disparate parts, about making things whole. 

For many months in the dark room, Daiyu is forced to learn English in preparation for this new life. She is given a new name, Feng, one of many layers she is forced to take on. (At Madam Lee’s brothel, she becomes Peony. And when she escapes to Idaho, she creates yet another new life with the name Jacob Li.) Once she comes to the United States, our hero believes she will be able to leave the curse of Lin Daiyu behind her, to start, as her calligraphy teacher would say, “with a blank sheet of paper every time.” 

But the bad luck (and Lin Daiyu’s spirit) stay with her. The injustices she is forced into are unrelenting. Honestly, it’s not a story for the faint of heart. And our narrator is just trying to tell it the way she knows best. Several of the early sections begin, “This is a story of…” It is as though our speaker is trying to fit herself into the right narrative. From the onset, Daiyu has rejected the tragic heroine trope—so she tells the story with its opposite: the hero’s journey.

On the surface, Four Treasures of the Sky is a story about a young girl who is kidnapped in China and forced to fend for herself in America. It is a story about the Chinese Exclusion Act, widely considered the first significant piece of federal legislation to restrict immigration for a specific nationality, of which she encounters the effects in 1880s Idaho. This story is remarkable for the way it brings to life the rippling effects of this law. Jenny Tinghui Zhang has given us characters to love and root for, and she has pinned to the page the daily devastations that they have faced. This is a story about the Chinese miners massacred in a new land. It is about the shop owners whose patrons started boycotting their stores. It is about the corruption of our so-called justice system. But what Zhang has also given us is the power of reclamation, of holding the brush in your own hand and telling your own story.

Master Wang has another golden rule of calligraphy: there can be no revisions. Every stroke is part of the character, is part of the story. 

These past few years have borne witness to heinous, heart wrenching crimes against the Asian community. Of course, Four Treasures of the Sky feels awfully timely. But it’s an important reminder that this is nothing new. We have seen this hatred before, in a chapter of American history that is often ignored. In a sense, this fierce debut is an act of encouragement. Pick up your pen, she seems to be telling us. Tell the story your way.