A raw, profane, and funny memoir.
The story of a volatile Chinese-Canadian childhood in a family beset by the “Woo-Woo” of mental illness.
Wong’s debut harrowingly portrays a family who “believed that mental illness, or any psychological disturbance, was caused by demonic possession.” She opens with her diagnosis of actual neurological impairment, migraine-associated vertigo, after she’d escaped to graduate school, “How nice to know that I was officially un-Woo, I thought, though he was diagnosing me with a lifelong disorder which left me confined to bed and frequently unable to read or write.” While appearing affluent, her extended family’s emotional entanglements created a chaotic household for Wong and her siblings. The author captures her father’s jovial cruelty in bleakly hilarious dialogue, as when he instructs her that “crying will turn you into a zombie like Mommy.” Wong’s mother also loomed ominously, refusing to receive appropriate treatment despite numerous instances of destructive rage—trying to light Wong’s foot on fire during an ill-starred family trip, noting, “it’s not like you need both feet, because you don’t move anyway.” This hallucinatory upbringing occurred within a caustically portrayed émigré community. From childhood, Wong’s ecologically damaged Vancouver suburb, where many Asian neighbors manufactured cannabis or methamphetamine in McMansions, seemed conformist, abrasive, and indifferent to criminal behavior. The author describes most characters with a visceral, grotesque sense of body horror, and she doesn’t ignore her own struggles with obesity and other maladies: “Puberty had transformed me into a four-foot-eight, 140-pound goblin.” Wong’s familial entropy culminated in her favorite aunt’s attempted public suicide, on a major bridge during Canada Day, gaining them further notoriety: “ ‘The cops said I was the best bridge jumper ever,’ Beautiful One squealed to me on the phone.” Nonetheless, the author moved toward redemption through understanding, noting of her mother, “she screamed because she was constantly afraid.” Wong confidently creates pungent dialogue and environmental detail. There are issues with pacing, in that the grim narrative progression can seem repetitive or meandering, but on the whole, this is a bracing debut.
A raw, profane, and funny memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55152-736-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself.
A fiercely provocative and intellectually audacious memoir that focuses on motherhood, love and gender fluidity.
Nelson (Critical Studies/CalArts; The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, 2012, etc.) is all over the map in a memoir that illuminates Barthes and celebrates anal eroticism (charging that some who have written about it hide behind metaphor, whereas she’s plain from the first paragraph that she’s more interested in the real deal). This is a book about transitioning, transgendering, transcending and any other trans- the author wants to connect. But it’s also a love story, chronicling the relationship between the author and her lover, the artist Harry Dodge, who was born a female (or at least had a female name) but has more recently passed for male, particularly with the testosterone treatments that initially concerned the author before she realized her selfishness. The relationship generally requires “pronoun avoidance.” This created a problem in 2008, when the New York Times published a piece on Dodge’s art but insisted that the artist “couldn’t appear on their pages unless you chose Mr. or Ms….You chose Ms., ‘to take one for the team.’ ” Nelson was also undergoing body changes, through a pregnancy she had desired since the relationship flourished. She recounts 2011 as “the summer of our changing bodies.” She elaborates: “On the surface it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside.” The author turns the whole process and concept of motherhood inside out, exploring every possible perspective, blurring the distinctions among the political, philosophical, aesthetic and personal, wondering if her writing is violating the privacy of her son-to-be as well as her lover. Ultimately, Harry speaks within these pages, as the death of Dodge’s mother and the birth of their son bring the book to its richly rewarding climax.
A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55597-707-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Expanded from a New Yorker article, this long-winded if well-informed tale has less to do with John Laroche, the “thief,” than it does with our author’s desire to craft a comprehensive natural and social history of what the Victorians called “orchidelirium.” Orlean (Saturday Night, 1990) piles anecdote upon detail upon anecdote—and keeps on piling them. Laroche, who managed a plant nursery and orchid propagation laboratory for the Seminole tribe of Hollywood, Fla., was arrested, along with three tribesmen, in 1994 for stealing rare orchids——endangered species——from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. He had intended to clone the rarer ones (in particular, the so-called “ghost orchid”) and sell them on the black market. Always a schemer and an eccentric hobbyist (old mirrors, turtles, and Ice Age fossils all fascinated him), Laroche figured he’d make millions. Found guilty, he was fined and banned from the Fakahatchee; the Seminoles, ostensibly exempt under the “Florida Indian” statute concerning the use of wildlife habitats, pled no contest. But Laroche’s travails form only the framework for Orlean’s accounts of famous and infamous orchid smugglers, hunters, and growers, and for her analyses of the mania for “the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things.” She traces the orchid’s arrival in the US to 1838, when James Boott of London sent a tropical orchid to his brother in Boston. That collection would eventually be housed at Harvard College. Orlean includes passages on legendary hunter Joseph Hooker, eventually director of the Royal Botanical Gardens; on collectors, such as the man who kept 3,000 rare orchids atop his Manhattan townhouse; and of other floral fanatics. Enticing for those smitten with the botanical history of this “sexually suggestive” flower. As for everyone else, there’s little or no narrative drive to keep all the facts and mini-narratives flowing. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44739-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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