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
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BOOK REVIEW
An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.
His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.
This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.
Pub Date: April 7, 1952
ISBN: 0679732764
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1952
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
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