Dragon's Gate

Otter travels from China to the States to join his father and uncle in the land of the Golden Mountain. But all he finds there is bitter cold and unfair working conditions as the white men overwork and exploit the Asian workers who are building a train tunnel through the mountain. Still, he manages to learn some valuable life lessons, including how to stand up for what's right in the face of terrifying authority, and by the time he begins his journey back home, he is ready to take that fight back to the Manchu.
This Newbery Honor book was fair but not earth-shattering. I admit to falling in and out of attention as I listened to it, although it did have its occasional gripping moments.

After a slow start, I got into this book pretty well. Yep's characters are interesting and reasonably complex, considering the target audience for the novel. I've always had trouble imagining what it might have been like during the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, and this novel (combined with the few months I spent in the Sierras in my 20s) gave me a start at picturing it. My 11yo isn't enjoying it much, though.

In this story of a boy named Otter who circumstance forces him to leave his home in China in the year 1867. He goes to live in California live with his father and uncle. The situation he faces is unlike the vision he had of his new home. He discovers that the Chinese workers endure horrific treatment by their employers. They are apart of a group that is slowly building a railroad across the Sierra Nevada mountains.

In 1867, Otter travels from Three Willows Village in China to California - the Land of the Golden Mountain. There he will join his father and uncle.

In spite of the presence of family, Otter is a stranger among the other Chinese in this new land. And where I expected to see a land of goldfields, I see only vast, cold whiteness. But Otter's dream is to learn all he can, take the technology back to the Middle Kingdom, and free China from the Manchu invaders.

Otter and the others board a machine that will change his life - a train for which he would open the Dragon's Gate.

Otter is a fourteen year old boy adopted and raised as the son of the wealthiest family in Three Willows Village, China in the 1860's. Accidentally killing a Manchurian soldier, Otter is sent to America by his Mother to join his Father and Uncle.

Uncle Foxfire is a visionary who dreams of learning more about America's machines and the new 'fire wagon' to free his people from the Manchurian rule and the English opium trade wars. Father and Uncle sign contracts to work on the transcontinental railroad where Otter joins them, only to discover themselves treated as the worst kind of slaves under impossible working and living conditions.

Ultimately, with his Uncle dead and his injured Father sent home, Otter will lead the Chinese in a protest show more to improve their wages and living conditions and participate in the completion of the railroad. show less

Young Adult book about a Chinese boy who comes to the US to work on a Railroad in the Sierra Nevadas. It is pretty predictable. He talks about how the workers came to the US & then went back to China & influenced the development of China, which is something I had not previously thought about.

Dragon'sGate tells an interesting story of a boy who wants to come to America but doesn't know what he's getting into as a laborer on the transcontiental railroad. It's just two years after the end of the Civil War, but in this book Americans are treating the Chineese workers as slaves, whipping them and preventing them from walking off the job.

The description of the conditions is long and detailed, and the begiinning of the story which occrus in China after the British have introduced opium trade is left unfinished. An interesting book, but a difficult one.