A compelling first novel by the Canadian Lee that tries to do for Asian-Canadian women what Amy Tan and Maxine Hong-Kingston have done for their Asian-American counterparts: give mythical shape to the experiences of immigration, assimilation, and struggle for identity in the West. Kae Ying Woo narrates this tapestry-like story, which traces three generations of the Asian-Canadian Wong family. The book opens with a recollection of the settler experiences of Kelora Chen, a half-native/half-Chinese, and the Wong family patriarch, Wong Gwei Chang, who in 1892 left China to find his fortune in North America. Kelora's heroic act of saving Wong's life symbolizes almost too obviously the great strength and struggle of the women who follow in their family line. Their lives revolve around the Disappearing Moon Cafe, the largest restaurant in Vancouver's Chinatown, operated by the overbearing matriarch Lee Mui Lan. Within her domain are Fong Mei, Lee's abused daughter-in-law, who is tormented for not rendering children to Lee's son; Seto Chi, Malaysian born, sold out of her family at birth because of the superstition that girl babies are bad luck; Beatrice, Kae's own mother, who breaks Chinese tradition by marrying a man of whom her family disapproves. Lee's theme is that these women endured a double discrimination—on the one hand, from the ``white-devils'' of the West, who limited their immigration and restricted their work choices, and, on the other, from patriarchal Chinese customs. The obvious feminist message fortunately includes large doses of wit and humor. Lee successfully combines magic realism and epic sweep in the fast-moving story, which should inspire mainly fans of the increasingly popular literature of Asian-American writers.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 1-878067-11-7
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
Smart, funny, humane, and superbly well-written.
A post-apocalyptic—and pre-apocalyptic—debut.
It’s 2011, if not quite the 2011 you remember. Candace Chen is a millennial living in Manhattan. She doesn’t love her job as a production assistant—she helps publishers make specialty Bibles—but it’s a steady paycheck. Her boyfriend wants to leave the city and his own mindless job. She doesn’t go with him, so she’s in the city when Shen Fever strikes. Victims don’t die immediately. Instead, they slide into a mechanical existence in which they repeat the same mundane actions over and over. These zombies aren’t out hunting humans; instead, they perform a single habit from life until their bodies fall apart. Retail workers fold and refold T-shirts. Women set the table for dinner over and over again. A handful of people seem to be immune, though, and Candace joins a group of survivors. The connection between existence before the End and during the time that comes after is not hard to see. The fevered aren’t all that different from the factory workers who produce Bibles for Candace’s company. Indeed, one of the projects she works on almost falls apart because it proves hard to source cheap semiprecious stones; Candace is only able to complete the contract because she finds a Chinese company that doesn’t mind too much if its workers die from lung disease. This is a biting indictment of late-stage capitalism and a chilling vision of what comes after, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Marxist screed or a dry Hobbesian thought experiment. This is Ma’s first novel, but her fiction has appeared in distinguished journals, and she won a prize for a chapter of this book. She knows her craft, and it shows. Candace is great, a wonderful mix of vulnerability, wry humor, and steely strength. She’s sufficiently self-aware to see the parallels between her life before the End and the pathology of Shen Fever. Ma also offers lovely meditations on memory and the immigrant experience.
Smart, funny, humane, and superbly well-written.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-26159-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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