Ai-mei gives a strange girl an old ginger jar belonging to her grandmother, believing it has no value. When she finds out how important it is to her family, she and her brother Lu Chen search throughout Chicago in an attempt to recover the jar.
Chicago's Chinatown is the scene of this excellent story of Chinese-American family life. Twelve-year old Ai-Mei, and her brother, Lu, 14, present a united front against the old fashioned ideas and customs of their parents and the old grandmother, with whom they live. Yet their family life is full of love and understanding and the reader gets a vigorous sense of one tiny segment of America, as experienced by the foreign born.
There is plenty of incident directly, and indirectly, connected with the disappearance of a green ginger jar and its valuable contents, of which the old grandmother-alone knows the secret. On it she was counting for the money to send Lu to medical school, despite his father's opposition.
The mystery provides a spur to get children interested in what is, on its own account, a grand story they might otherwise miss. Of all the long list of books in which Clara Judson has introduced children of many nationalities, this is outstanding.
United States