A convincing novella of mid-20th-century Minnesota via the point of view of a Chinese family.
A young Chinese-American woman surveys a Midwestern small town with a gimlet eye.
This handsome reprint of Telemaque’s (The Sammy Wong Files, 2007) first novella, originally published in 1978, concerns the early life and first real love of Ching Wing, an unhappy girl in a stifling world. Her father, Mr. Wing, doesn’t know how to run his restaurant, The Canton, and his daughter’s fed up with it. Ching grows up waiting tables in a “kind of a bastard Chinese restaurant, where they served roast milk fed turkey along with the usual chop suey and chow mein.” Her mother sits at home all day and pines for the old country and the nephew she’s saving up to bring across the Pacific and then across the prairie. Situated, quite literally, on the wrong side of the tracks, the house where the Chings spend their off hours isn’t much to speak of either: “ ‘The junk house’ I called it because of its second-hand furnishings, which I hated.” Ching feels torn: half-American and half-Chinese. There’s no future for her among the mildly racist clique girls and freeloading “bums” her father entertains out of charity. She’s afraid of both the white and black boys. Suddenly, her life lights up. Bingo Tang, son of a more successful restaurateur, arrives to stay the summer at the junk house, and Ching sees stars. “Dear God,” she prays at night, “I won’t ask anything again. Just make him love me. Make me pregnant. Then make him marry me.” The story of Ching growing up and getting out of town plays out against the colorful dreariness of a 1960s-era Midwestern hamlet. Readers are introduced to a number of amusing characters like the never-present but much-talked-about Mr. Sorensen, a landlord who communicates his wishes via newspaper announcements, and the thoroughly assimilated Mr. Fung, who dislikes anything that smacks of charity. Telemaque has clearly read her Sherwood Anderson, and the small frustrations of a narrowly circumscribed and landlocked life are convincingly, not to say claustrophobically, evoked. This is a useful novella for anyone interested in Chinese-American history or, indeed, why it’s crazy to stay Chinese in Minnesota.
A convincing novella of mid-20th-century Minnesota via the point of view of a Chinese family.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 978-0-7388-1730-9
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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