THE FORTUNES

By Peter Ho Davies,

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,

282 pp., $27

In his new novel, Peter Ho Davies exhibits the same rich ability to inhabit a historical setting that distinguished his first, Booker Prize longlistee “The Welsh Girl.’’ His imaginative empathy is even more striking in “The Fortunes,’’ which traverses a century and four separate lives to investigate the Chinese-American experience. From Ling, a 14-year-old immigrant to “Gold Mountain’’ in the 1860s, to John Ling Smith, a Michigan college professor who ambivalently visits China for the first time to adopt a daughter “at the start of the Chinese century,’’ Davies gets under the skin of protagonists who feel divided between two cultures, fully belonging to neither.

The distance traveled over the course of the 20th century can be measured by the fact that Ling is the offspring of a Chinese prostitute and her wealthy white protector, who when she died in childbirth promptly handed off their baby to a brothel owner and drug trafficker, while John is the son of a white airline pilot married to a Chinese stewardess, “an original Singapore Girl’’ who tells him he is “a child of the jet age.’’ The anti-Asian bigotry displayed in two intervening sections, based on the real-life stories of movie star Anna May Wong and 1980s hate-crime victim Vincent Chin, remind us that the distance hasn’t been traveled without a struggle, and we still have a long way to go.

Unrelated in plot, the four sections are unified by themes and images established in the first, which follows Ling from a Chinese laundry in Sacramento to a job as valet to railroad mogul Charles Crocker, who is persuaded by Ling’s physical strength that “coolies’’ are the workers he needs to blast tracks through the California mountains. Davies’s unsparingly depicts racist violence inflicted on Chinese men — their long braids, called queues, are both objects and instruments of abuse, on occasion employed to lynch them — but the novel is also notable for its powerful feminist critique of China’s patriarchal culture. “Chinamen love gold more than girls,’’ says Ling’s great love Little Sister, sold into prostitution by her own father. “[N]one of you want daughters. Daughters are bad luck, daughters are shameful.’’

When Wong tells her father, “I’ll be famous . . . make you proud,’’ he replies grimly, “Famous, maybe. Proud, no.’’ Respectable Chinese women like her mother don’t show themselves in the street, let alone in the movies. Born in Los Angeles, the first place Wong “felt like an American’’ was in the audience of a movie theater. Yet onscreen she can never kiss a white costar or play anything but vamps and tramps. Visiting China, she is reviled as “a disgrace to Chinese womanhood.’’ On the contrary, she decides a few years later, she is “something else entirely. Chop suey! Chinese American.’’

Forty years later, racism is still so brutally blind that Chin is beaten to death in Detroit by two white auto workers who think he’s Japanese and blame that nation for the American industry’s woes. This section, narrated by a semi-fictional friend who escaped the brawl, again allows Davies to mingle social observation with portraits of complicated human beings who aren’t entirely defined by their circumstances. The term filial duty, used in earlier sections with hideous irony to show daughters being whored out or even killed in its name, morphs into the obligation Chin was ducking the night he got into a fight with two white guys at a strip club: to be the perfect, high-achieving Chinese-American son his parents have made sacrifices for all their lives. Yet the word at which he took mortal offense that night was an epithet that included the word mother. “It’s unfilial, okay?’’ says the narrator.

There’s a surprising amount of such dark humor. John remembers his junior-high buddy Ken Takamura advising clueless classmates who can’t tell Japanese from Chinese Americans, “You nuked my folks; his are going to nuke you. Figure it out.’’ With his suburban background, white wife, and sense of “inauthenticity’’ John has reached a stage of assimilation familiar to every immigrant group in America: comfortable enough to feel uncomfortable.

The novel’s lovely closing pages tentatively resolve the conflict felt by all four of Davies’s protagonists between being yourself and representing an entire race. Recalling the first emperor’s army of terracotta warriors, massed together in the thousands, each sculpted with an individual face: “What else can we represent if not ourselves, however uncertain and contradictory those selves might be?’’ he thinks. Every page of “The Fortunes’’ makes palpable the uncertainties and contradictions that propel us all, even as it illuminates the particular dilemmas of the Chinese in America.

THE FORTUNES

By Peter Ho Davies,

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 282 pp., $27

Wendy Smith, a contributing editor at The American Scholar and Publishers Weekly, reviews books for the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.