The novel is also an excellent portrait of Gold Rush San Francisco, depicting the poverty, prostitution, and racial hatred with horrible clarity. The novel details a San Francisco fraught with racial tension between the newly arriving Chinese and the Americans, often erupting into violence and murder. What is interesting is the hatred possessed by the whites of the Chinese ghettos and prostitution rings -- things which they themselves had a part in creating. Particularly horrifying is the life of the Chinese prostitute, both objectified and villified, living short lives filled with terror.
The other girls in your line of work started losing their hair at eighteen, their teeth at nineteen, and by twenty, with their vacant eyes and decrepit faces, they were as good as dead, silent as dust.(2)
The anti-Chinese attitude is further examined by the narrator's voice, which presents the story as a collection of imaginative detail gleaned from historical fact. As a fifth-generation Chinese immigrant, the narrator of the novel explores the parallels between Gold Rush era prejudice and the modern world with its neo-Nazi hatred running rampant on talk shows
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