The Concubine’s Daughter-Pai Kit Fai

The Concubine’s Daughter
Pai Kit Fai
St. Martin’s, Sep 29 2009, $14.99
ISBN: 9780312355210

In 1906 on the Great Pine Spice farm in Southern China, septuagenarian farmer Yik Munn is outraged when his teenage concubine Pai Ling gives birth to a worthless female as she will one day bear sons for some other farmer. He sets out to kill his newborn Li-Xia. She survives due to the specter of a fox fairy scaring her father and his wives; which enabled her mother to leap through a window with her in her arms. Her mom died when she made the jump, but Li resides in a rice shed ignored by her father.

When she turns eight, Li rejects binding her feet as demanded by her father who wants to increase her sale value. Rather than argue with her, he sells her to a silk merchant who puts her to work in the field while Li dreams of an education like her mom had so that she can read and write. English Sea Captain Benjamin Jean-Paul Devereaux buys her from the silk farmer and takes Li with him to Hong Kong. They marry and she has a child Siu-Sing, but her spouse’s gruesome adversary assaults Li. To keep Siu safe, she is sent away, but years later as WWII explodes in Asia, she returns to her birth town seeking her roots, but the “Little Star” faces danger in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

This is a superb first half of the twentieth century epic Chinese tale through the eyes of three generations of women trying to make it better for their offspring in a world in which females are sold like cattle. Each of the women is fully developed as is their society; but especially the second and third generations who heed the advice of Pai to gather their thousand pieces of gold. THE CONCUBINE’S DAUGHTER is a terrific historical thriller that provides profound insight into China during the first four decades of the previous century.

Harriet Klausner