'Dragon' tale based on family's colorful history

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

•	"THE MONEY DRAGON" by Pam Chun, Sourcebooks, hardback, $24

Chun's great-grandfather, L. Ah Leong, whom she frankly acknowledges as a scandalous rogue, had as colorful a life as anyone could wish for in a book's key character: a dramatic return from the dead, a rise from penury to immense wealth, wives and children spread literally from here to China, a blighted love who haunts him as a ghost, and a stubborn and foolish pride that became his undoing.

Chun has constructed this, her first novel, in much the way she received the facts on which it is based: as a series of stories, incidents stripped of context and told in the family for six generations. She employs First Daughter-in-Law, The Phoenix, to create a whole from these pieces, one who can narrate the story while standing enough apart to see how pride, greed and ingratitude are destroying the family, but close enough to be there, dutiful and forgiving, when Ah Leong finally realizes too late how wrong he has been.

As a first novel, it's a bit rough: The action is sometime choppy, the portrayal of Hawaiians stereotypical, the shifts of points of view sometimes too abrupt. Chun buys the discredited definition of haole as meaning ha 'ole: without breath, lifeless, a slur on Caucasians.

But this is a good and engrossing story, L. Ah Leong and The Phoenix are intriguing characters, and it provides a window to Honolulu's little-known past.