Chapter 1, The Land of the Demons Summary

Dragonwings is a historical novel about the lives of Asians who immigrated to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This novel is also inspired by an Asian immigrant who is rumored to have built and flown a flying machine that was an improvement on the design that originated with the Wright Brothers.

Moon Shadow is eight years old by the method of the Tang People, seven by American standards. He has lived most of those eight years without his father, Windrider, because his father went to America, the Land of the Golden Mountain, while Moon Shadow's mother was pregnant with him in order to make his fortune. All Moon Shadow knows of his father are the stories his mother and grandmother have told him and of the kites his father built and...