At the library, I found many accounts about Chinese acupuncturists and herbal doctors dating from the time of the Gold Rush. They often ran flourishing medical practices, seeing both Chinese and Caucasian patients. I was surprised to discover over 300,000 Chinese had come to "Golden Mountain," as they called California, between 1849 and 1882. They worked in the gold fields, railroads and factories, ran small businesses, planted orchards, and fished up and down the West coast.

In the 1870’s there were several dozen Chinese fishing villages lining the San Francisco bay. Hundreds of men and boys lived and worked in these villages. I was fascinated by the idea of these fishermen who had come here so long ago. What had their lives been like? Why do we know so little about them today? Instead of writing an article on Chinese medicine, I became captivated by the idea of telling the story of living and working in one of these villages.

Not far from where I live is the China Camp State Park , a fishing village that has been preserved by the state. (http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=466) Though I had driven by the sign on the freeway innumerable times, I had never stopped to visit. One bright, windy spring day I headed for the park. The China Camp ranger, Pat Robards, took me out on the rebuilt pier, showed me how shrimp were brought in, cooked and dried, and where and how the fishermen lived.

In the afternoon, I sat on the sandy beach and tried to go back in time and imagine what it would have been like to go out fishing on a sampan, or boil up thousands of shrimp and spread them to dry in the sun. I wondered what it had been like to live right on the edge of the water, where the waves lap at the shore and the sun shines through moisture laden air. I remembered the many times as a child when our family spent weekends at a cabin perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Summers we ran free on the beach, and winters we gathered near the fire as wind and rain buffeted the tiny cabin with its thin wooden walls.

Back at the UC Berkeley library, I found old books, magazines, and documents about the Chinese in America. I read about Chinese fishing boats and working conditions in the fishing camps. I spent hours talking with an elderly friend, Augusta Li, and several of her relatives. Mrs. Li was born in San Francisco and told me stories of early Chinatown and working in the fish canneries down by the bay.

A story was forming in my mind, about a boy sent to live with his uncle in a fishing camp on Golden Mountain. But I didn’t know much about fishing, or being out on a boat for hours and hours. So I went to my friend Rusty McBride, an avid fisherman and San Francisco Bay Pilot. For years he has sailed out of the Golden Gate and clambered up ladders into the big ships coming in, taking over the controls and piloting them through the waters. He knows every inch of the bay, every tide, every cove, every hidden shoal, every school of fish. I asked him hundreds of questions. How do the winds feel? When you are out on the water, does the fog hold the smell of seaweed like it does on shore? How does a storm feel when you are out in a little boat?

As I sat in my study mulling all of this over, a name came to me for my boy—Jo Lee. Jo Lee became a real person to me. Sent to America because his mother didn’t have enough rice to feed both his little sister, Mei Mei, and him, Jo Lee arrived to live with an uncle he had never met. A taciturn man, his uncle cared for him as he could, but Jo Lee needed to find a way to bear the pain of being separated from his mother and sister, and to put his roots down in California’s fertile soil.

I was struggling with Jo Lee’s dilemma when my father, who loves to tend and prune and graft fruit trees, told me about Mandarin oranges and how they came to America from China. Eagerly I asked him: How were they brought here? By seed? Possibly, he replied, or by cutting thin branches from the trees and planting them here.

I gave Jo Lee a bundle of orange branches, cut from his mother’s trees, to bring with him to plant in America. But somehow it didn’t feel like enough. What of his loneliness, his longing for home and family? There had to be another, deeper way for him to accept his new life here.

One day when I was looking up an obscure combination of acupuncture points, I stumbled across a tradition in Chinese medicine that I knew little about, where humans are considered to have five spirits, rather than a single soul. One of these spirits, the Hun, is the dream spirit. The Hun excited me – Jo Lee sprang to mind. I had the feeling that Jo Lee’s dream spirit could provide the solace he needed. Eagerly I looked for more information about these five spirits, but I found little. The communist Chinese consider the Hun part of the religious roots of Chinese medicine, so information on the five spirits has been suppressed and destroyed for decades.

At the Chinese Studies Library at UC Berkeley, where all the books are in Chinese, the librarian tracked down old, obscure references to the Hun and interpreted them for me. By phone and e-mail I contacted Chinese medical experts in several countries. Bit by bit, I found information about the dream spirit: that it shines out of the eyes during the day and at night can leave the body and travel to other places, especially when the need is great.

Back in my study, I melded Jo Lee’s physical and spiritual lives and saw how, with the help of his dream spirit, Jo Lee could connect with his mother in a way that alleviated his desperate loneliness. He could have hope, and love, and make a life for himself in America.

Though I have published several books before, this is the first time I have combined my dedication to Chinese medicine with the joy of writing fiction. For me, it was an exhilarating coming together of two parts of my life.