When Ling finally earns enough to return to San Francisco, he reconnects with Little Sister, now the madam of her own thriving harem. Later, he takes a job as a bone collector, collecting the bones of the Chinese workers who died on the job and sending them back to China. But as Ling gets to know the workers, he finds he fits in with them, so he quits his job as a servant and works on the railroad far from San Francisco. As Ling continues working for Charles, he realizes that Charles only wants him as a sort of token Chinese employee, someone to smooth over his image and relationship with his Chinese railroad workers. Soon, Ng sells Little Sister to another elderly man. She tells him that Ng is her father and essentially her pimp. With his first earnings, he takes Little Sister on a date. Charles Crocker, a railroad tycoon who frequents the laundry, hires Ling as his personal servant. Ling falls in love with Little Sister, but she won't have sex with him without receiving payment. Little Sister works alongside Ling at the laundry, a job she balances in addition to her second career as a prostitute. He arrives in San Francisco and works at Uncle Ng's laundry, dreaming of someday amassing a fortune. After his mother dies, he is sold, at the age of 14, to a laundryman in America. The first part of the book, 'Celestial Railroad,' centers on Chinese orphan Ah Ling, the biracial son of a white man and a Chinese prostitute. The Fortunes won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, and The New York Times named it a Notable Book. Each tale features a character of Chinese descent, three of whom Davies based on real people, as they attempt to navigate the world in their respective eras, resulting in a generation-spanning saga of a larger immigrant family. British author and academic Peter Ho Davies’s historical novel The Fortunes (2016) is presented in the form of four interconnected short stories.

The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies