New York Times Book Review: The Poker Bride

If ever there was an example of how far reaching the game of poker is, then this is this is it! Not only is it influencing modern literature but also gets a feature in one o fthe world’s most regarded news papers – The New York Times!

The Poker Bride:

Dominique Browning’s review of Christopher Corbett’s “Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West” (Feb. 21) discusses the “bride” of the title, Polly Bemis, as though she had just been unearthed from the archives. In fact, Polly Bemis, or Lalu Nathoy, as she was born, is a Chinese-American pioneer well known to many readers thanks to Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s historical novel “Thousand Pieces of Gold,” published in 1981.

Browning credits Corbett with documenting this “little-known story” from a “dark history,” while Corbett passes over Lum McCunn’s work, briefly characterizing “Thousand Pieces of Gold” as “very loosely based” on the historical record. His dismissal is puzzling given Lum McCunn’s scrupulous account of her authorial decisions in her essay “Reclaiming Polly Bemis,” an academic treatment of the same subject.

Lum McCunn not only drew from Sister Mary Alfreda Elsensohn’s account, mentioned in the review, but also traveled to Idaho to track down people who still held Bemis in living memory. She combed through government documents and archival newspapers and pieced together the fragments of Bemis’s story.

Lum McCunn began her research into the life of Bemis and other Chinese-Americans at a time when there were few Asian-American figures in our history books, and she continued despite the confident pronouncements of publishers that there was no market for such stories. For this, she should be acknowledged, by writers and reviewers alike.

PATRICIA STEENLAND
Berkeley, Calif.

Published on March 19, 2010, in the New York Times Online