Overview

A young Chinese wife is separated from her husband when he goes to America to work for his uncle in Augusta, Georgia. When he does not return home five years later, she takes a ship from Hong Kong to San Francisco without asking permission from the family patriarch or telling her husband's family that she is leaving. Her husband's eldest uncle, who makes all decisions for the family stops her in San Francisco and orders her to return to China. Furthermore, he orders her husband to divorce her because she is disobedient. She escapes the uncle determined to take a train across the United States to get to Georgia. Tong gangs and dangerous white miners block her way, but she perseveres until she reaches her gold. On her arrival she finds her husband is caught between her desire to stay married and his family's threat to disown him if he does not divorce her. Her impetuous flight has jeopardized the marriage she was trying to revive. Can this Chinese couple stay together and find a way to satisfy their family? Will the invisible thread tying them together stretch 10,000 miles? Set in China and America at the end of the nineteenth century, this novel is based on historical facts about Augusta, Georgia's first Chinese residents.