Dragonwings Characters

At the beginning of Dragonwings, Moon Shadow is a wide-eyed boy who simply wants to meet and love his dad and America. He has heard horror stories and glamour stories alike about the Land of the Go...

Windrider, or Father as we first know him, is a complicated character. Moon Shadow loves his father whole-heartedly and looks up to him. And with Moon Shadow as our narrator, we see Windrider from...

Uncle Bright Star seems so dark, so cryptically evil almost, yet he has a heart of gold. When we first meet Uncle Bright Star, we don't get why he comes across as so intimidating. Why does he stand...

Before we meet Miss Whitlaw in Chapter 6, we as readers might anticipate that she is nasty both inside and out. After all, with the exception of Mr. Alger, Moon Shadow's experiences with "demons" (...

Robin, the first "demon" kid that Moon Shadow meets, turns out to be all right. OK, so she's clumsy and kind of nosy (like when we meet her, she falls over the door while spying), but mostly Robin...

One of the first things Black Dog does after we are introduced to him is throw a steel knife on the table for Moon Shadow. He warns Moon Shadow that knives are necessary in America. This is ironic...

Though it seems like our only encounter with Mother is in Chapter 1, her presence actually weaves the whole book together through letters and Moon Shadow and Windrider's thoughts of her. At the beg...

We readers aren't allowed much access into the world of Grandmother; the little we do know is through the context of the Lee family. We know that Grandmother and Mother run the family farm, but tha...

Hand Clap's name is pretty fun, both because he is a notorious exaggerator and because he is the person who figuratively holds Moon Shadow's hand in the travel from China to America. We might get t...

Lefty is the poet and the reformed gambler of the Company. The figure of his missing right hand is ironic since it is both his prize and his doom; that is, both his hand to write poems with and his...

White Deer is a vegetarian and a devout Buddhist. Though he is an herbivore, however, White Deer cooks a wide array of scrumptious-sounding foods, including meat, for his cronies in the Company. Re...

We meet Mr. Alger early on in Moon Shadow's story, and the narrator soon tells us it is to be a fortuitous meeting. Indeed, Mr. Alger is the first kind "white demon" we meet by name in Dragonwings....

Old Deerfoot is a crucial middle man in the Lees' story. Without Mr. Deerfoot, the Lees would not have met up with the Company for the Feast of Pure Brightness to restore good will between the men....