Bitter Cane

A young Chinese laborer follows in the footsteps of his missing father to the sugar cane plantations of 1880s Hawai‘i, hoping to redeem his family’s name. Instead, he finds himself caught in the same world of exploitation—and the same destructive obsession—that consumed his father before him.

Told against the backdrop of a plantation system that virtually imprisoned its immigrant workforce, Genny Lim’s Bitter Cane is a powerful exploration of Chinese immigrant labor, family, and the forces that can bind one generation to the next.