MOON CAKES

A first novel as beautifully wrought but as emotionally remote as a stylized Chinese painting, detailing a young Chinese-American woman's bittersweet journey through memory and the present in search of meaning and self. Born in a small midwestern town where her parents, both first- generation immigrants, had settled and prospered, narrator Maya Li opens her account of her journey at its end—the southern tip of China, where she is spending the last night before leaving for home. Maya's voyage has a long history. As she begins the recollections that intersect with descriptions of the tour she's just made, she recalls that her odyssey began with a futile childhood search in her all-American hometown for moon cakes, traditional symbols of wholeness honored by her father, a doctor whose warm nature contrasted with the cool perfectionism of her mother and older sister. Depressed by her dead-end New York job and haunted by the past, Maya is searching for a completeness that her hyphenated background has not offered so far. As her tour group visits the major sights from a Mongolian yurt camp to the tombs of Xian, Maya begins to understand herself and her Chinese heritage. She recalls her father's early death; her undistinguished adolescence; her futile love for Lance, who later died of AIDS; and the great love of her life, Hong Kong native Alex, who left her because loyalty drew him home. Now she understands that she has also been looking for ``that pull of home'' Alex had obeyed and her father had listened for even in America. Wonderful rendering of details, both domestic and foreign—the sections on China are especially vivid—but Maya, like so many first-novel protagonists, is overwhelmed by her mission to relate and remember. Still, a writer to watch.