Dragonwings

Laurence Yep was born on June 14, 1948, in San Francisco, California. While Yep’s paternal grandfather was also born in San Francisco (in 1867), he moved to China as an adult and started a family; Yep’s father Thomas was born in China but immigrated to the U.S. as a child—an event in Yep’s family history that inspired the immigration journey of Moon Shadow, the protagonist of Dragonwings (1975). In San Francisco, Yep attended St. Ignatius College Preparatory, a famous Catholic high school. He went on to study at Marquette University in Wisconsin, where he met his future spouse, writer and editor Joanne Ryder; however, he transferred to UC Santa Cruz, which awarded him a BA in 1970. In 1973, Yep published his first novel, a work of young-adult science fiction titled Sweetwater. He has gone on to publish dozens of works, including picture books, chapter books, plays, and a Star Trek tie-in novel. His most famous book series is perhaps the Golden Mountain Chronicles, 10 novels that follow the fictional Young family’s immigration from China to the U.S. and their lives as Chinese Americans. The first published of the Golden Mountain Chronicles, Dragonwings (1975), was a Newbery Honor Book. Currently, Yep lives in California with his spouse Joanne Ryder.

Dragonwings represents its fictional characters surviving the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a real natural disaster that struck California on April 18, 1906. The earthquake damaged gas mains that subsequently caused fires. Moreover, and more famously—as Dragonwings relates—a San Francisco woman accidentally started what is known as the Ham and Eggs fire by trying to cook breakfast after the earthquake had, unbeknownst to her, seriously damaged her chimney. This fire, raging out of control, destroyed a huge part of the city. Over the course of a few days, the quake and the subsequent fires destroyed approximately four-fifths of San Francisco. From April 18 through July 1, 1906, soldiers took control of the city to police looting, assist the Fire Department, manage the movement of San Franciscans rendered homeless by the disaster, and so on. As Dragonwings illustrates, while some soldiers kept order, others participated in looting themselves. During the reconstruction efforts after the quake and fires, some San Francisco politicians attempted to displace Chinese immigrant and Chinese American San Franciscans from their traditional Chinatown neighborhood, relegating them to the outskirts of San Francisco County. However, San Francisco’s Chinese community successfully resisted these attempts and reconstructed the neighborhood in which they had originally lived.

Dragonwings is the first published of Laurence Yep’s Golden Mountain Chronicles, a 10-book series describing the immigration of the Young family from China to the U.S. and their lives as Chinese Americans. Other notable entries in the Golden Mountain Chronicles include Yep’s Child of the Owl (1977), about a 12-year-old Chinese American girl who goes to live with her grandmother in Chinatown after her father has a bad accident. Dragonwings takes its epigraph from the Book of Changes, also known as the I Ching, a work of ancient Chinese literature originally composed sometime between 1000 and 750 BCE. The novel also alludes to more recent literature. For example, its early-20th-century child protagonists Moon Shadow and Robin read E. Nesbit (1858–1924), an English children’s book author, and specifically Nesbit’s 1904 fantasy novel The Phoenix and the Carpet. They also read dime novels such as the Nick Carter detective stories, serialized pulp fiction about a hardboiled private investigator first published in 1886. Finally, Dragonwings is a children’s book about Chinese American culture; more recent children’s books involving this theme include Kelly Yang’s Front Desk (2018), about a 10-year-old Chinese-American girl who mans the front desk at the motel where her parents work, and Andrea Wang’s The Many Meanings of Meilan (2021), about a Chinese-American girl who moves from Boston’s Chinatown to Ohio.