Elegantly textured, encompassing several voices

and intricately woven plot lines, Gift of the Golden

Mountain is the story of a family s passions, past

and present, played out against the explosive

Vietnam era in San Francisco and Berkeley,

Hawaii, China and finally the fall of Saigon in 1975.

It chronicles the odyssey of a young, part-Chinese

heiress, May Reade, as she searches through her

illustrious heritage for the roots of her own identity

and her struggle to reconcile her Asian self with

the American. That journey will take her from the

antiwar barricades in Berkeley to the primitive

villages of a strange and distant land, from confu-

sion and hurt to self-knowledge and love.

Gift of the Golden Mountain is the continuing

story of California s prominent Reade family first

chronicled in the author s best-selling novel Hers

the Kingdom. May s American father, a famous

radical, died when she was thirteen; her beautiful

but mysteriously heartbroken Chinese mother suf-

fered a loss of face that forced her to abandon

Meijin soon after her birth. Throughout her life

May has been haunted by the question Why did

my mother leave me? May longs for resolution at

any price, and she risks her life to meet her mother.