Dragon Road: Golden Mountain Chronicles: 1939 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dragon Road: Golden Mountain Chronicles: 1939 Elizabeth Bush Yep, Laurence Dragon Road: Golden Mountain Chronicles: 1939. HarperCollins, 2008 291p Library ed. ISBN 978-0-06-027521-1 $17.89 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-027520-4 $16.99 R Gr. 6–10 In the latest entry in the long running Golden Mountain Chronicles, Yep focuses on Calvin Chin in his angry-young-man late teens. Disgusted with his drunken father, regularly demeaned by elders in his San Francisco Chinatown community, and desperate for work amid the Great Depression, Cal and his buddy Barney have been working small-time basketball hustles all around the area. They’re spotted by Jack Coughlan, a Celtics has-been, who is putting together a team of professional Chinese barnstormers called the Dragons. Cal and Barney’s girlfriends act as their agents and coerce them into signing a stringent contract that tightly monitors their road behavior and sends the bulk of their money home to be banked. And it’s a good thing that end is covered, because there’s plenty of trouble for them to get into as it is, with concerns for anti-Chinese prejudice in the towns they visit, contentions with Jack over nonpayment of wages, and most significantly, tension between Cal (now known as “Flash”) and his ambitious teammate Topper Tom over who owns the spotlight. Readers have courtside seats for some vividly detailed rumbles, and encounters with historically documented teams such as the Native Americans, House of David, and Harlem Globetrotters are rousingly told. Although this title can be enjoyed outside the context of the Chronicles, readers who have followed the larger story will appreciate the connection between young Cal and Barney and the men they appear as in Yep’s previous works. A note explains Yep’s research and his use of family history; a brief bibliography is included. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois