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"In 1857, when Chen Pan signs a contract that will take him from China "beyond the edge of the world to Cuba," he has no idea that he will be enslaved on a sugarcane plantation...or that he will eventually, miraculously, escape his bonds and embark on a prosperous life in Havana's Chinatown...or that he will buy a mulatto woman out of slavery and take her into his home and heart...or that he will end his long days in Havana, surrounded by children and grandchildren, as Cuban as he is Chinese." In a vivid tapestry of incident and feeling, Chen Pan's life story is interwoven with those of two of his descendants: his granddaughters, Chen Fang, born in China and raised as a boy so she could be educated, her life coming to its end in one of Mao's hellish prisons, and Domingo, Chen Pan's great-great-grandson, who, with his father, becomes an American citizen after Castro's revolution, only to lose his parent to the false promises of the American dream, and himself, finally, to the madness of wartime Vietnam. [via]