Dead Man's Gold

These ten original ghost stories dramatize the tumultuous history of 140 years of Chinese immigration to North America - from the poor village men who first cam searching for gold in the late 1850s to the new immigrants who arrived from Hong Kong in the wake of the Communist victory in China. As with the award-winning collection, Tales from Gold Mountain, Paul Yee's stories are fiction by told in the style of the traditional folktales that were shared with fellow men in the bachelor halls or with children and grandchildren at family banquets. But they are also ghost stories, a popular Chinese narrative form.

The characters in these stories are men and women, rich and poor, greedy and good, young and old - all Chinese immigrants struggling to make new lives for themselves in North America. Yet wherever they go, they are followed by reminders of their home country - the curse of a friend betrayed, the ghost of a faithful spouse, the spirit of a dead parent.

Accompanied by eerie,evocative plates by award-winning illustrator Harvey Chan, these tales provide young readers with a New World mythology of immigrant stories.