Learning to Fly, Like People In History... Laurence Yep's Dragonwings

It's a cold Saturday afternoon, as Stew and I walk home against the wind on the newly poured sidewalks, already lined with crumbling brown maple leaves, already decorated with stray spray-paint scribbles. Stew points this out. In my hand, I'm carrying two books about Daylight Savings Time, and a collection of poems about the Hartford Circus Fire. And two other books that Stewart has picked out for himself. One to read on his own, and one for me to read to him for storytime. Considering these, I say, "Hey, Stew."

"Yeah?"

"I think you might have a new favorite writer."

"Laurence Yep?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"I think he's one of my favorite new writers too." We keep walking. Our neighbors' tall, recently dead paper birch announces the turn onto our cul-de-sac, up a short, laboring hill to our house. My lit-loaded arms rejoice! "And hey, I never even would have known him if it wasn't for you. You picked that book out. I never would have. And now, we both have a new favorite writer. That's so cool."

Stewart smiles, a sincere smile that acknowledges both the coolness of Laurence Yep, and the unapologetic dorkiness of his new Dad. "Hey," he says. "We're climbing a Golden Mountain," making a grinning reference to the book we've just finished reading: Yep's 1975 novel Dragonwings.

"Yeah," I say, "but I don't think we'll be able to fly a plane off of it." We laugh lightly. And we're home.

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Moon Shadow is an inquisitive eight-year-old boy when he receives a letter from his father, a man he has little memory of, an unapologetic dreamer who's lived across the ocean in the land of the Golden Mountain for several years - most of Moon Shadow's life. Moon Shadow is to leave his mother and his village in the Middle Kingdom - China - and join his father in that strange place with the white demons.

When he arrives in San Francisco, Moon Shadow is introduced to the Company, a group of cousins and uncles he's never known, with whom his father, and now, he himself, works, running a laundry shop. There's Hand Clap, the exaggerative cousin who accompanied Moon Shadow in his travels, and White Deer, his thoughtful foil. There's Uncle Bright Star, the curmudgeony Company patriarch, constantly given to pronouncements about "the superior man", and Black Dog, his angry, disillusioned son. And finally, there's Windrider, Moon Shadow's own father.

In the Middle Kingdom, Windrider had been famous for the brilliant kites he built, kites Moon Shadow had devoted himself to learning to fly. Here in the demon land, when he wasn't working at the laundry, Windrider was a compulsive tinkerer, reading (as much as he could) the white demons' technical magazines and books, and building his own little gadgets, much to the consternation and ridicule of his skeptical, however loving, Company brothers. One day, as he and Moon Shadow are making their daily rounds, they encounter a white motorist having troubles with his cars; Moon Shadow offers his assistance, and even though he'd never worked on cars before, figures out how this "gadget" works, and manages to fix it, realizing a new, sell-able skill, and making a friendly, professional contact with a white demon.

This comes in handy when a confrontation between Black Dog and Moon Shadow turns ugly. Windrider and his son subsequently leave the Company to live among the demons, where they each take odd jobs, befriend their landlady Miss Whitlaw and her niece Robin; and where Windrider, inspired by news of the Wright Brothers' recent flight in Kitty Hawk, pursues his dream of building his own flying machine.

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Part of Yep's intermittent Golden Mountain Chronicles series of books, which, taken as a whole, amounts to a vast family epic about the lives and struggles of Chinese-Americans over the last century-and-a-half, Dragonwings, inspired by an anecdotally brief article about a man named Fung Joe Guey, who flew a self-made biplane over the hills of Oakland on September 22, 1909, couches the story of Moon Shadow, Windrider, and their flying machine in a dimple of American history.

Almost more moving than the story itself is Yep's vivid, painterly re-creation of San Francisco at the dawn of the 20th Century, first detailing the anatomy of the separate, autonomous Chinese enclave in which the Company thrives - the brotherhoods and gangs that emerge not just as a social and economical protective against the white demons' persecution and exclusion of the Chinese, but also a natural, even biological, result of the almost total womanlessness of their society; the oral histories, the social memory, and the newly forming myths and rituals of these Chinese men in their new homes - the ghosts of lynched fathers, the proud tales of blowing holes through the mountains to make way for the white demons' railroads.

Then, Yep places that well-drawn society within the even larger society of San Francisco, and by extension, America; breathing three-dimensional life into men long depicted as stereotypes and squinty-eyed stick figures, and placing these men's unwritten stories and characters within the country's larger, more familiar history - the radical, "unelected" Teddy Roosevelt, the Wright Brothers' first flight, and, most vividly, the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 - doing it all in a way that adds meaning and depth to the central narrative, which, itself, lends a greater depth to our own history.

Dragonwings is lovingly and reverently written, full of sweet, familial humor, colorful characters with complex relationships to one another, and a gorgeous, wistful setting. It's a story full of poetry, drawing the dreamy into the mundane, and profane into the noble - a lovely, memorable juxtaposition of one man's modest creation in the aftermath of a massive, terrible destruction. It's a great book for teens, but highly recommended for any reader.

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MORE LAWRENCE YEP:

Dragon of the Lost Sea (1982)

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MORE Y.A. HISTORICAL FICTION:

Robert Cormier: Heroes

Cynthia DeFelice: The Apprenticeship of Lucas Whitaker