Very moving and provacative prose. A young Chinese/American searches for his heritage through letters, stories and dreams trying to find the "real" history of his family. Nothing is as he imagined....loss of all family at an early age left him with just memories to paste together with a few facts, his Mother's stories and a box of letters. Travelling about the Californis area of his Great-Grandfather's time he seeks actual places and imagines seeing the same scenes of forest and bird life, etc. Imagining the hardship of working the railroad through the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the 1860's. Trying to find the "place" and substance of each of four generations. Very moving and emotional at times. I loved the sense of his searching for what part of America belonged to him after these generations labored long and hard but no real history exists today of any central part the many Chinese bones that are buried in our soil. A very good read condensed into a fairly small book in size.
