I've often wondered if God forgot to give me the geneaology gene so prevalent in other Mormons. I mean, my mom and her twin sister haunt cemeteries, spend hours on the computer, and pore over musty records just to find the names and dates of our ancestors. For me, that's drudgery. I'm much more interested in the stories behind the names and numbers. Give me a journal or a biography or a historical novel - a story - and I'm in heaven. Laurence Yep, Newberry Honor-winning children's author, seems to agree with me. In the introduction to The Dragon's Child, he says, "Historical fiction is more than a record of dates and statistics: it should be a dialogue with the dead" (ix). This is what intrigues me - the conversations, the experiences, the stories of people long gone.
When Yep's niece presented him with transcripts of interviews taken with his father, he couldn't resist entering his own "dialogue with the dead." The papers recorded an interview conducted when Gim Lew Yep was a 10-year-old boy seeking entrance into the U.S. At that time, many Chinese men immigrated to America to earn money for their families in China. Each time the men travelled between the two countries, they had to pass a test before they were allowed back into the U.S. According to Yep, the immigrants had to answer detailed questions about their families, villages, and neighbors. In the Afterword of The Dragon's Child, he explains:
"To understand just how detailed these records were, try drawing a map of the block on which you live. List all the people in each house and what they do, and also list all their pets. Then record the births, deaths, and marriages of all your immediate family - including uncles and aunts, parents, brothers, sisters, and grandparents - for three generations and describe what the current living relatives do and where they live. Finally, write down how many windows and doors the houses have and in which direction they face. That will give you some idea how much a Chinese immigrant was expected to know" (113-114).
The purpose of these tests was, of course, to prevent Chinese people from settling permanently in America. However racist these exams were, the recovery of the transcripts granted Yep the opportunity to "speak" with his father about his experience coming to America. As a result of this conversation, he created The Dragon's Child, a fictional look at his father's fight to get to the place the Chinese referred to as The Golden Mountain. Yep wrote the book for children (ages 8-12), but it offers valuable insights for us all.