The Fire Horse Girl by Kay Honeyman (review)

Jade Moon’s family attributes her headstrong personality to being born most unluckily under the fire sign in the Year of the Horse. Unmarriageable within her Chinese community in 1923, seventeen-year-old Jade rejoices at the opportunity to accompany her father and a handsme family friend, Sterling Promise, to the United States, where she is convinced she’ll live a more fulfilling life. It’s only during their detention at Angel Island that she uncovers an intricate net of deceit and bribery that culminates in “paper son” Sterling Promise receiving his landing papers. To avoid returning to China with her father, Jade Moon steals Sterling Promise’s papers, disguises herself in his clothing, and enters San Francisco under his identity. She doesn’t last a day before being taken under the wing of a tong leader and trained to run numbers for his gambling business. Eventually she realizes that the “protection” of the tong comes at a steep price, and the freedom she hopes to find eludes her. By then Sterling Promise has gained entry and begun to work for a rival tong. Will the attraction between the couple prevail, or is the depth of their mutual treachery insurmountable? Obvious love-story conventions point, of course, to a happy conclusion, but the twists and turns along the way make for pretty involving reading. Honeyman enriches the standard feisty-girl-in-disguise fare with plausible details about tong domination of gambling and prostitution, and she offers a nuanced look at the tongs, organizations that once provided order and support to an immigrant community until being overrun by corruption. Historical notes are appended.