THE MONEY DRAGON

The destructive forces of lust, greed and consuming pride influence the rise and fall of a Chinese family living in Hawaii in this carefully researched and atmospherically evocative narrative. Chun has based her first novel on her own family history, and she works assiduously to vivify the colorful clan, the Laus, and their towering patriarch, L. Ah Leong, known throughout China as "the Money Dragon." As a boy in China, her great-grandfather "revives himself" from the dead after he's thought to have drowned and vows to gain such huge "face" and fortune that no one will ever again disdain him. Although he acquires wealth and power as a merchant in Hawaii, he fails to take into account the essential conflicts in American/Hawaiian and Chinese cultures, or the infinite stubbornness of his equally formidable first wife, Dai-Kam (there are three others), whose jealousy poisons even her relationship with her own sons. Told largely through the eyes of Phoenix, the wife of First Son Tat-Tung, the story is epic but sad, and the Lau children and grandchildren gain peace only after the old man's death. Phoenix suffers for years, watching Tat-Tung, a scholar and fine, sensitive musician, slowly destroyed by his parents' bickering, as they obsessively find fault with him, each other and his father's other families. The narrative is slow in spots, and Chun does not always do justice to the richness of the material. The wrenching emotions of family dynamics come through, though, and for many in the Chinese-American community, the narrative will have particular resonance, especially since a fine selection of photographs depict the protagonists and their environment. Agent, Elizabeth Pomada.(Mar.)

Forecast:A foreword by former U.S. Senator Hiram Fong, who knew the author's grandfather, should spark brisk sales in Hawaii.