This warm account of a Chinese family’s assimilation in Minnesota during the anti-Communist ’50s is a familiar, heartfelt...
Under the scourge of McCarthyism, 21-year-old Chinese-American Telemaque was forced to question whether she was the all-American she always thought herself to be.
At home on the Minnesota-Iowa border, Telemaque’s family ran the Canton Café. There, her father, uncle and cousins served Chinese food to the locals, aided by a liberal-minded lawyer “Mayor Johnny” and the friendly kuie (ghosts) conjured by her mother. Their lives were a rich mix of Chinese tradition, insisted on by her mother, who refused to learn English and feared her children would turn into “white devils”; and of the capitalist politics fervently espoused by her father, a supporter of Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists during the Chinese Civil War. As a student, Telemaque spent her afternoons at the café, studying in a back booth, cleaning celery for the chow mein and ringing up customers. Frustrated by her mother’s unremitting Chinese-ness, Telemaque modeled herself on the Americans around her, at one point so taken with a teacher’s tale about a girl with flaxen braids that she attempted to dye her black hair yellow. But as Telemaque grew to understand her mother’s proud past, she sought Chinese groups in college, mainly to meet men. Though diligently working at the UN and with UNESCO, she found herself under the scrutiny of the US State Department’s Loyalty Board: Her associations in college, the Chinese student group and American Youth for Democracy were on the Attorney General’s “spy” list. In a heart-wrenching scene, her father, a capitalist and American to the core, is accused by an FBI agent of being anti-American. Caught in the loopholes of confusing immigration laws, he was forced to plead his case through his English-speaking daughter with as much dignity as the two could muster. Though her story ends abruptly and there is little reflection in the narrative–the author recounts anecdotes more often then she explores her own motivations or insights–the vignettes of her family and life are as sincere and cozy as the descriptions of her father’s restaurant.
This warm account of a Chinese family’s assimilation in Minnesota during the anti-Communist ’50s is a familiar, heartfelt American tale.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4257-1238-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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