FOUR TREASURES OF THE SKY

FIVE CHINESE HANGED IN IDAHO is a literary historical epic set in the late 19th century that follows a Chinese girl named Daiyu through four phases of her life.

Where the lush adventure of Alexander Chee's THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT meets a Chinese-American epic, FIVE CHINESE HANGED IN IDAHO is born: the story of a girl kidnapped from China and smuggled to California at the height of the Chinese Exclusion Act, forced to reinvent herself as three different people in order to survive. Steeped in untold history and Chinese folklore, this novel is a spellbinding feat. Zhifu, China, 1880: a girl named Daiyu, masquerading as a boy, is abducted from a fish market and taken to San Francisco. Keeping her company are memories of her family, her calligraphy teacher, and the tragic spirit for whom she was named: Lin Daiyu, whose cursed fate is never far from Daiyu's mind. In America, Daiyu is forced to shed her name. She was already disguised as "Feng," an orphan boy, when she was kidnapped in Zhifu; in San Francisco she becomes Peony, an indentured prostitute; then back to boyhood as Jacob Lee, a fugitive shopkeeper trying to stay anonymous in Pierce, Idaho. But while Daiyu has been on the run, anti-Chinese racism has begun to soar. When it sweeps the west in a wave of unimaginable violence, Daiyu must channel each of the many people she has been - including the ones she most desperately wants to leave behind. From FIVE CHINESE HANGED IN IDAHO's first page, you'll know you're in the hands of a master. That the book is exquisitely plotted, propulsive, heart wrenching, and immersive is a gift; that it illuminates the horrors of the Chinese Exclusion Act, never before rendered in major historical fiction, means that this novel will be among the first of its kind. The sweeping narrative might be comparable to PACHINKO, or more recently, HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD. Jenny Tinghui Zhang is a Texas-based Chinese-American writer who holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Wyoming (where she wrote the popular Catapult column Why-oming) and is an alumna of the 2016 VONA/Voices, Tin House Summer 2019 & Winter 2020 Workshops. Jenny is a prose editor at Adroit Journal and has written nonfiction for The Cut, HelloGiggles, Bustle, and Huffington Post; her fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, Passages North, CALYX, The Rumpus, and more.