The novel follows three siblings in Vancouver's Chinatown in the late 1930s and early 1940s, focusing on the cultural divide across generations, with the Japanese invasion of China and Canada's entry into the war running in the background. The older two children get about a quarter of the book each, the girl's story taking place when she's quite young and seeing the world through the twin lenses of Shirley Temple movies and her grandmother's Monkey King stories. Whereas the boy, who was adopted after a tragedy killed his birth parents, is approaching puberty, spending a lot of time at a boxing gym trying to be the next Joe Lewis, and developing an agonising crush on the bad boy next door. In both, the war is still very much overseas, though its deeply affecting the Chinese community. By the time the youngest takes over narration for the back half of the book, the Commonwealth is in the war, and Vancouver's Chinese and Japanese communities are violently at odds.

More than anything, it's a portrait of Chinatown as it was, with so much of the population people who came with the railway building generation, and the old country's dialects, religion, traditions, rivalries still live on with them. The neighbourhood overflows with intertwined family histories and tragedies, most of the men battered by a life in heavy industry, most families trying to set by a little extra to ship their ancestors' bones back to China. Each of the children navigate the questions around identity differently, finding value in one tradition or another, while trying to find a place in a Canada that doesn't want them.

Gorgeous, nuanced book. I see there's a sequel (prequel?) about the oldest sibling who didn't get a point of view in this one, which I mean to check out.