This volume of interconnected stories, part of Coffee House's series by Asian-American writers, introduces a young Chinese immigrant. Working from a decidedly autobiographical base, Wang Ping presents horror stories of Maoist China from which most of the horror has been carefully removed. Wang uses the first-person voice of a young woman named Seaweed to tell of the depredations of the People's Revolution. Plastic surgeons are outlawed and forced to clean hospital bathrooms to atone for their sins; makeup and long flowing hair are forbidden; young children are left with grandparents in distant cities because there's no time to care for them at home; middle-class children who are graduated from high school are forced to spend two years working and living among peasants before they'll even be considered for the few college spots available; and peasant schoolgirls are sold into disastrous marriages. Finally fulfilling her dream of an education, Seaweed manages to attend graduate school in New York, get a green card, and find employment as a substitute teacher in Chinatown. Her day-to-day existence might be easier, but she's haunted by familial shadows (two sisters desperate for her to bring them to America, her father's death, her aunt and grandmother) and the untranslatable concept of chu jai—according to which, regardless of success, a Chinese woman does not have a ``home'' until she marries. The outer circumstances might change, but Seaweed's emotional tenor remains consistent: the caring young woman, refusing to be ashamed of her past, keeping a serene presence despite all odds. English might be the author's second language, but she has mastered a conversational tone that seems graceful and effortless—but, unfortunately, also one-dimensional. To fulfill the promise evident here, Wang will have to flesh out other characters and create multilayered tension. The only thing missing here is drama.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56689-025-X
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
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
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