FATHER AND GLORIOUS DESCENDANT

A biracial biography and autobiography combined, as the author tells of his father's life in and around San Francisco, and the family's hyphenated worlds. From father's embracing what the new world has to offer but retaining his belief in Chinese training, to the children's exposure to both ways of life and their balance between the two, this is a mature, humorously wise account of the complex problems confronting two generations. Father's business ups and downs, mother's gentle ruling, and the household adaptation to stepmother after mother's unexpected death, are the dominant patterns, with many, colorful threads of hatchet men and tongs, smuggling, the three Nicaraguan refugees, father and driving a car, Wall Street, the American daughter-in-law and first grandson, wildcat soup, and the glory of father's Longevity Feast. Good picture of a Chinese boy growing up in a Chinese community, on the fringe of a great white city, of his emergence from a wholly pattern of thought and way of life into a mixed and often conflicting -- pattern. It should prove an excellent leavening in these days when the racial problem needs to be approached with new perspective. The author goes for Chinatown in reverse what Carl Glick did in Shake Hands with the Oragon.