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
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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