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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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