The Serpent's Children

The story takes place in 1849 in China which was, at that time, quite a different country. It's still run in a very old fashioned; the Manchus are the rulers. Foreign powers have made excursions into China. Bribery and corruption is extremely widespread, and the peasant class suffers terribly under the oppression of the various factions, which doesn't even count the danger from bandits and other clans.

It's a world where the farmers are struggling just to survive, and often have a severe lack of food themselves due to the amount of their crop they must give to the landlords.

The story is about a family of three; the father, Cassia and her brother. Her father believes in a revolution against the Manchus, but ends up wounded and limping. Cassia tries to take the place of her deceased mother, while her brother, Foxfire, is clumsy, impolite and a dreamer.

The story is about their lives and how they hear of the “golden mountain,” the U.S., where people get rich easily and a mountain of gold is there for the taking, according to the stories.

It's an excellent story of their lives and the lives of the farmer class living in China, and of how the story of the “easy riches” in the U.S. resulted in many Chinese coming to this country. Many of them, though, died on the boats coming in; many did not succeed in their quests, but those who did were able, like Foxfire, to send money back home.

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