2008 Northern California Book Award Finalist.
Husband and wife reunited after ten years; young prostitute in love with the preacher's daughter; psychic madam who watches it all; shocking discovery that destroys a town. Set in a Sacramento Delta Chinese farming community, Locke 1928 chronicles the effects of separation and betrayal, laws and immigration, on its citizens and what happens when a Chinese ghost myth becomes real. Imagined history, recuperation of unacknowledged American lives, sophisticated reading of human passion, and deep meditation on the meeting of East and West, Shawna Yang Ryan's first novel is a true tour de force.
Locke 1928, originally published in 2007 by El Leon Literary Arts, will be republished in 2009 by Penguin Press.
Shawna Yang Ryan writes with even frightening intimacy about: preachers, bootleggers, prostitutes, ghosts, and an utterly convincing soothsaying madame. Every word she writes about their storied, haunted, tule-fogbanked Sacramento River town rings absolutely true. Savor Locke 1928, this brilliant incarnation of the California novel, and you'll be amply, richly rewarded. Just to read it will ruin you for Steinbeck.
—John Beckman, author of The Winter Zoo
[Locke 1928] is beautifully written, dreamy and evocative. The book imagines a town in which life is haunted by desire and pain; where premonitions of future despair are tenuously kept at bay by gin, sex, and occasionally a tenderness that looks something like love. I don't know whether the novel is true to what life was like in Locke, but it draws very effectively on historical Chinese beliefs about the power and dangers of sexual attraction.
—Beverly Bossler, author of Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, and the State in Sung China (960-1279)
Shawna Yang Ryan's novel casts the heyday of a misty American river town, once full of Chinese bachelors, in a feminine light. Hers is a sensuous and sinewy swirl of men missing women, and women embracing men. She unwinds tales of shame and longing among the dollar-a-day men from China— the pear pickers and asparagus pullers with "aching wrists" and "crooked fingers." All the while, their consorts race between loving and loathing, heat and regret, myth and destiny, abandonment and sadness, in a quest to search out meaning 'on the other side of the fog.' Her lyrical prose meanders lightly in an appealing weave of the gossipy and the ghostly. Ryan's vivid imaginings offer a moving and memorable complement to the lives of the young men who came from China nearly a century ago with their transpacific dreams. After decades of toil in the Sacramento delta, many of them found separation, yellowed walls and then death, alone.
—Todd Carrell, Writer/Producer of "American Chinatown"
In Shawna Yang Ryan's finely written first novel, interior and exterior voices conflict, merge, and diverge again, creating a pattern of flight and contact that mirror the strange socialtity that is Locke in 1928, a community of immigrants and exiles. We are given not only history but also history's imprint on private psyches. The conflation between private and public memory, the paradoxes of desire, and the uneven dynamics of power at the intersection of racial and sexual difference all contribute to make the characters of Locke 1928 at once haunting and seductive.
—Anne Anlin Cheng, author of The Melancholy of Race
Ryan writes with the spare and disciplined prose of the committed artist, at once conjuring and compressing, urging us to feel what she feels and yet trusting us get there as quickly. Locke 1928 is a terrific and promising performance.
—Daniel Duane, author of Caught Inside, A Surfer's Year on the California
Locke 1928 cloaks the muscular brutality of the treatment of early Asians in America in a style reminiscent of classic Chinese brush painting. Passion between a preacher's daughter and a prostitute, the reconciliation of a husband and wife apart ten years, a violent chain of separations and reunions, and a final scene that engraves lost Chinese wife Ming Wai's "triumph"—this is the stuff born of an exotic Sacramento Delta locale that is still of a distant past.
This is a very impressive debut, and Shawna Yang Ryan has bright future written all over her. Remember her name—you'll be seeing it often over the next few decades.
—Jack Hicks, co-editor of The Literature of California
Artfully woven, exquisitely modulated, walking a master's line between ancient Chinese myth and the grit of immigrant life in the Sacramento Delta, Locke 1928 tells the unforgettable story of a town brought to its knees by loneliness and longing. Complicated, compassionate, haunting, Shawna Ryan's novel feels more like tapestry than words on paper, her prose less like sentences, and more like song.
—Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness
Shawna Ryan's Locke 1928 is a multi-layered marvel of a book. The prose is a delight, the characters fascinating, the story richly imagined and heart-rending. This first novel of grace and substance presages a notable literary career for Shawna Ryan.
—John Lescroart, author of The Hunt Club
A beautiful debut, Locke 1928 opens up a page in history that sometimes is forgotten by both cultures that once coexisted in Locke, a Sacramento Chinese farming town. By mapping out the familiar and the strange territories of human passion and retelling the old myths, Shawna Yang Ryan tells a story that, in the end, is about how America was truly made.
—Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Rich in sensuous detail, and rich also in interwoven imagery of fire and water, of destruction and creation, Shawna Yang Ryan's impressive debut novel Locke 1928, gives voice both to the community and to the individuals who make up the Locke of her title, a small Sacramento River delta town where Chinese immigrants, Chinese-Americans and white Americans intermingled and sometimes intermarried. The novel seems modest in its geographical scope and in its cast of characters, but it's actually quite audacious in the way it experiments with its genres—simultaneously a history, an historical fiction, a realistic portrayal, an example of magical realism, and a ghost story. It also happens to be a flat-out fine read!
—Ron Loewinsohn, author of Magnetic Fields
Shawna Ryan is a gifted writer who has a great feeling for the language and its natural lyrical possibilities. She is a writer who deserves to be taken seriously.
—Clarence Major
Memory, mystery and myth fuse in this well-spun tale of real life in an Old Chinese town on the Sacramento River Delta. If you've never seen Locke, you'll want to visit once you've read Shawna Yang Ryan's sumptuous first novel. Locke 1928 mingles concrete descriptions of the everyday with highly charged eroticism and mysterious yet plausible renderings of the interior lives of displaced sojourners in faraway Gold Mountain. This is a real trip: an imagining in fiction of an historical experience recoverable perhaps in no other way.
—Forrest G. Robinson, author of The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain
Many stories remain to be told. The delta part of the California-Asian world still sits there, and Shawna Ryan went into it, even lived it for a while. Her writing is crafty, sinuous, and strong with evocative color and smell--she's good on odors-- and on physical details, both heavy and light. (There is much adult physicality—heavy drinking, puking—the story goes way into a juicy territory that it is not so sexual as it is bodily inside and out). Shawna is precise on society and history and persons. I have a deep respect for this work, and no doubt as to her powerful future potential.
—Gary Snyder
Like the murky waters of the surrounding Delta, a hunger for life surges and recedes across Locke: labyrinth and gated memory palace of dream and desire at the epicenter of the Chinese-American experience.
—Kevin Starr, Professor of History, University of Southern California
Locke 1928 is an auspicious debut that not only entertains, but opens our eyes to a rich, poignant piece of Chinese-American history.
—Gail Tsukiyama, author of Dreaming Water
In this lyrical debut novel, Shawna Yang Ryan evokes the hard labor, deep losses, and loving redemptions of Chinese immigrants, those who loved them, and California itself. A startling, rich, and remarkable work that echoes long after the book is closed.
—Louis S. Warren, author of Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show
This book captures a unique moment in California history, when boats, 'each represent[ing] a Delta produce,' go out on the Sacramento River to reenact an ancient Chinese myth. But it's much more than a historical chronicle; it's a beautifully written first novel, of haunting relationships and haunted inner lives.
—Alan Williamson, author of Almost a Girl: Male Writers and Female Identification
The stories in Locke 1928 are uniquely portrayed by this very talented writer. Vivid and surreal imagery of water, fire and air parallels the changing world of Chinese immigrants trying to forge a new world that entices and frightens them by turn. Ryan's evocative descriptions are poetic, elucidating how these proud, strong men and women see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and dream America. A beautiful first novel.
—The Historical Novels Review
....a curiously distinctive read.
—The San Francisco Chronicle
Locke 1928 is breathtakingly haunting. I've ingested the characters and will carry them with me…. A completely moving work worth reading, without a doubt. If you have a to-be-read list, this one must be placed at the top.
—Carp(e) Libris
Locke 1928 is, simply, exquisite writing--"the startled egrets stretch their wings and lift up like incandescent sheets being shaken to dry"--ethereal and rough, mysterious and earthy. This is a book to seek out and to treasure.
—Marilyn Dahl, Shelf-Awareness
