This is another book I had never heard of before my book club elected to discuss it for our book this month. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it yet, but maybe I’ll have a better idea once I’m done writing about it. It’s definitely intense, so I’m going to have to follow it up with some lighter fare before moving onto another dark one.
The family Chao is a Chinese family living in Haven, Wisconsin. The parents, Leo and Winnie, are both immigrants from China. They had three sons, Dago, Ming, and James. Dago left briefly to pursue a music career, but returned to help his dad with the restaurant when his mom got sick. Ming works in finance in NYC and wants nothing more than to put as much distance (literally and figuratively) between himself and his hometown. James is the sweet, innocent, naïve youngest son studying to become a doctor.
The book starts with James in a train station on his way home for Christmas. An old Chinese man asks him for help, them promptly collapses from a heart attack. James calls 911 and administers CPR, but it’s too late. The man is dead.
In all the confusion caused by a man suddenly collapsing in the middle of a train station, James accidentally grabs one of the man’s bags by mistake and doesn’t realize it until he’s already in Haven and Ming is picking up from the station. He has every intention of trying to track down the man’s family to give them the bag, but he gets distracted when he runs into his childhood crush, Alice, and by the time he thinks to look for the bag, it’s gone. The family tries to track it down because it contained the old man’s life savings: $50,000.
Leo and Winnie own and run a Chinese restaurant serving what Americans want to eat, regardless of whether it resembles anything served anywhere in China. Winnie makes notes of what their customers want and they learn to make those dishes.
Every year the Chao family hosts a huge Christmas party. Winnie used to be in charge, but since she got sick and moved into a Buddhist convent, she’s out. Since Dago is preparing to take over the restaurant, he has also taken over responsibility for hosting the Christmas party. He thinks if he hosts the best Christmas party ever, his dad will make him a partner in the restaurant.
His dad is a greedy asshole who delights in tormenting his family and has absolutely no intention of making his son a partner in the restaurant, despite Dago claiming his dad promised him he would make him a partner if he helped in the restaurant while Winnie was sick.
Complicating matters is the fact that Dago has been engaged for years to a Chinese woman named Katherine who was raised by white parents. Katherine is the dutiful girlfriend who looks great on paper, but Dago has fallen out of love with her. Instead, he has started up a romance with Brenda, a white woman who wouldn’t give him the time of day when they were in high school, but once she starts working at the restaurant, they reconnect and start sleeping together.
Dago has been trying to convince Katherine to let him out of the engagement and give her back the family ring he gave her, but Katherine refuses to budge. She insists his affair with Brenda is nothing more than a fling that will burn itself out.
Brenda wants to marry a man of means, so Dago is desperate for money, even putting a down payment on a penthouse he can’t even begin to afford unless his dad makes him a partner in the restaurant … which of course his dad will never do.
James also succeeds in getting Alice into bed. They carry on their affair for a while, but it seems to be based more on lust than any real emotion.
The night before the Christmas party, Dago broadcasts on a local radio station with his ham radio about how much he hates his dad and fantasizes about killing him. He specifically mentions the freezer in the restaurant, which locks from the outside. A key is kept inside the freezer at all times, but what if the key were to go missing and Leo found himself trapped inside?
Lo and behold, on Christmas morning, after Dago and Leo have a huge fight at the party over Leo refusing to make Dago a partner, Leo turns up dead in the freezer.
Dago is put on trial and convicted for the murder of his father, although he insists he’s innocent. But if Dago didn’t do it, the question is, who did?
The author never tells us the answer, but it’s strongly implied that another Chinese immigrant working at the restaurant may have had her own motivations for killing Leo. Unlike Dago, who literally broadcast his plan, she did such a good job of hiding her tracks from the very beginning that no one had any reason to suspect her.
As for the bag of money that went missing, the family suspects Leo found out about it and took it, but no one can prove it. Towards the end of the book, James does some research and finds out about the price of gold at the time the bag of money went missing. He found three bricks in the basement that appear to have been recently painted over…