Lui's memoir demonstrates an undeniable mother–daughter bond that leaves readers with one overriding lesson: “[L]isten to...
Laineygossip.com blogger Lui strikes a discordant note with the title of her memoir, but readers will find an affectionate tribute to her tough, powerful Chinese mother.
When the author was young, an unnaturally loud voice earned “Ma” the sobriquet Squawking Chicken. It’s an “all-out assault…sharp, edged and quick,” writes Lui, who felt the sting of her mother’s tongue many times. After her parents divorced when she was 7, the author spent the school year in Toronto with her low-key father and vacations in Hong Kong with her demanding mother. Ma’s child-rearing techniques included telling ghost stories that warned against behavior that brings bad luck, using feng shui edicts to control decisions and strict rules of comportment. Readers may laugh at the embarrassing-moments-with-Mom stories and also squirm at Ma’s verbal cruelty. In contrast to a permissive, childcentric parenting style so pervasive in Western culture, Ma abhorred praise as a motivator and discouraged unrealistic aspirations. Bragging and rebellion were met with public derision, and shaming and demeaning were the preferred forms of punishment. Though open affection was rare, her love was indisputable. Ma’s harsh ways reflected a determination to spare Lui the hardships she had to endure. At 15, she quit school and went to work at a restaurant to support her siblings while her unemployed parents “slept off all-night mah-jong sessions.” Then, while walking home after work, she was raped. With no sympathy from her parents, she voiced her shame, anger and frustration by screaming all night. That was the birth of Squawking Chicken. Thereafter, she used her voice to protect herself and others. For all her in-your-face tough love, baffling and amusing rules, and opinions about people and situations, Ma has been, more often than not, uncannily right-on.
Lui's memoir demonstrates an undeniable mother–daughter bond that leaves readers with one overriding lesson: “[L]isten to your mother.”Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16679-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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