Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze

Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze is a 1932 children’s novel by American author Elizabeth Foreman Lewis. Set in China near the Yangtze River, it follows Fu Yuin-fa, a young man who travels from the farmlands of western China in the hopes of training as a coppersmith in the river’s largest industrial city, Chungking. Yuin-fa, who goes by “Young Fu,” gets an apprenticeship under the city’s most famous coppersmith, Tang, and undergoes several years of rigorous training. Along the way, Young Fu builds his character and learns the virtues of sincerity, honesty, and industry. The novel has been criticized for its pro-colonial resonances, particularly the positive portrayal of the work of white Western missionaries and scholars in the Eastern world as it strove to develop and still preserve its traditions.

At the beginning of the novel, thirteen-year-old Young Fu arrives in Chungking with his widowed mother, Fu Be-be, to live off Chair-makers Way. They come with a friend’s letter addressed to the master coppersmith Tang Yu-shu, imploring him to take Young Fu under his wing. Tang shows compassion for Young Fu and Fu Be-be, allowing them to live together in a small room in town rather than require Young Fu to live in his shop. With this independence, they have an opportunity to explore the city together.

The following chapters depict Young Fu as he incrementally comes of age through a series of lessons. At the beginning of the novel, he is comically self-centered and naive. As he encounters the city’s poor, wealthy, thieves, government employees, activists, and travelers passing through, he constructs a more stable concept of self. Through many months of hard work, he becomes an excellent coppersmith. During the following three years, Tang and Young Fu become as close as family.



Though Young Fu displays many qualities and virtues, his biggest asset is luck. The townspeople believe the gods favor him, and some attribute his luck to Fu Be-be’s frequent offerings at the shrine of the goddess Kwan Yin. Others believe that he is lucky by birth. His first great stroke of luck is to be apprenticed to Tang, out of many applicants. His second occurs midway through the book when he accidentally becomes indebted to his cousin, a jeweler on a farm outside Chungking. When he finds he has no money to repay him the three dollars he owes by the deadline of New Years Day, he overhears his aunt refer to the falling snow as a dragon’s “wintery breath.” In a stroke of entrepreneurial insight, he fills several baskets with dense snow and sells it in town as “dragon’s breath.” He somehow ends up with a surplus of cash and uses it to support his mother.

Later, Young Fu saves an international hospital in the city from a fire and rescues an elderly couple from drowning in a flash flood. When his friend, Small Li, is afflicted with appendicitis, Young Fu prevents Li’s mother from calling the priests, knowing that they will employ useless rituals that will only cause pain and resign him to death. His karma pays off when he sends for a female employee he saved in the hospital fire to take care of Small Li. In these episodes, he demonstrates the virtue of selflessness. At the end of the book, after many good deeds and much hard work, Young Fu is rewarded when Tang asks to adopt him as his son.

Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, modeled after certain Eastern traditions. Though it has been criticized for representing these traditions in a distinctly Western, colonialist framework, it is one of few popular American novels from the early twentieth century that celebrated the culture and perspectives of China and its people.