The City of Jade Trees

An eloquent chronicle of the fortunes of four generations of one family, whose lives intertwine with pivotal moments in U.S. immigration and Chinese American history

“I have made you a fish, now you must find water.” As family lore has it, Margaret Woo’s great-great-grandmother spoke these words to her son before he left for America in the 1880s. She had sold her only water buffalo to pay for the steam ship ticket, knowing that in sending him in search of a better life, she might never see him again. With these words, she set in motion an odyssey spanning four generations.

The City of Jade Trees is Woo’s family’s story, beginning with her great-grandfather, an early “sojourner,” and her grandfather, whose arrival coincided with the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and continuing with her father, a trained navigator in the Flying Tigers, and her mother, the privileged daughter of a member of the infamous Green Gang. By the time Woo stepped foot on American soil at the age of seven to join her family, who now ran a Chinese restaurant, it was during a rare welcoming window of immigration reform.

Illuminating the greater arc of Chinese American history and the history of immigration to the United States, The City of Jade Trees is a powerful, moving story of each generation of a family forced to negotiate their own identity as they leave all that they know behind for a future they cannot yet see.