Sad songs

His ah-ma was Liu Song, while Willow was just a facsimile — an actress with makeup and fancy gowns putting on a show.

Jamie Ford, Songs of Willow Frost

The Chinese-American author Jamie Ford has a mission to the tell the story of the Chinese people in America, and as readers of the bestselling Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet know, he does that very well. Those who loved the earlier novel will not be disappointed with Songs of Willow Frost (2014).

Twelve-year-old William has spent the last five years of his life in a Catholic orphanage in Seattle. It is 1934, the heart of the Depression, and like so many of the children in the orphanage, he is not actually an orphan. As a Chinese boy, he knows his chances of being adopted are practically nil, but what he really wants is to find his mother, his ah-ma.

Liu Song, who uses the stage name Willow Frost, is a beauty with a fine singing voice who has had small parts in movies in which she always cries and always dies. William has recognized her in one film he is allowed to watch, and when he learns she is coming to Seattle to appear in a show, he escapes the orphanage along with Charlotte, a blind girl, to try to find her. He wants to learn why she left him in that orphanage.

From then on the novel becomes mostly flashback, telling Willow's sad story. William's father is Willow's stepfather, who raped her after the death of her mother. She manages to  escape before he can learn she has had a son, but Seattle's Chinatown is only so big. She can keep her secret only for so long.

Her story added to William's story may leave readers crying right along with Willow, but Ford gives us an ending that brings out the sunshine.