Ursula, under

Description:

"In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft - "the only sound is an astonished tiny intake of breath from Ursula as she goes down, like a penny into the slot of a bank, disappeared, gone." It is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in the rescue of this little girl, the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. One TV viewer following the action notes that the Wong family lives in a decrepit mobile home and wonders why all this time and money is being "wasted on that half-breed trailer-trash kid."" "In response, the novel takes a leap back in time to visit Ursula's most remarkable ancestors: a third-century-B.C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned playmate of a seventeenth-century Swedish queen; Professor Alabaster Wong a Chautauqua troupe lecturer (on exotic Chinese topics) traveling the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century; her great-great-grandfather Jake Maki, who died at twenty-nine in a Michigan iron mine cave-in; and others whose richness and history are contained in the induplicable DNA of just one person - little Ursula Wong." "Ursula's story echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that her very existence - like ours- comes to seem a miracle. Ursula, Under is a saga of culture, history, and heredity."--BOOK JACKET.

subjects: Chinese Americans,  Fiction,  Finnish Americans,  Girls,  Interracial marriage,  Mine accidents,  Mine rescue work,  Poor families,  Racially mixed children,  Marriage, fiction,  Michigan, fiction,  Fiction, suspense,  Chinese americans, fiction,  Young women, fiction,  Fiction, thrillers, suspense

Places: Upper Peninsula (Mich.)