A pleasant but unremarkable work of immigrant literature.
Choy’s second novel, about growing up Chinese in Canada, is a companion piece to his prize-winning debut (The Jade Peony, 1997).
In his debut, Choy focused on three children in Vancouver’s Chinatown before WWII; here, he revisits that family, the Chens, from a different perspective. Narrator Kiam-Kim is only three in 1926 when he arrives in Canada with his father and his grandmother, Poh-Poh; they are fleeing famine and war, and the disintegration of China will form the story’s backdrop. They have been sponsored by Third Uncle, a prosperous warehousing merchant who finds them accommodations. Kiam’s mother died young. Father must not marry again, to avoid upsetting his wife’s ghost (“Ghosts and Old China haunted us”), but a companion is arranged for him, to be known as Stepmother. She will give birth to a girl and then a boy; along with an adopted orphan, they form the trio of The Jade Peony. Superficially, this is Kiam’s story, the First Son who must set an example, and who has an unusual best friend in Jack O’Connor, the white boy who lives next door. Kiam experiences the familiar adolescent rites of passage, such as the showdown with a deadly street gang and heavy petting with Chinese neighbor Jenny, though no actual dates, for they would involve older escorts (“Chinatown’s idea of birth control”). Bound by this web of family and neighbors, Kiam’s questioning of traditional mores is limited, even as he is upstaged by Poh-Poh, who dominates the novel; Father and Stepmother are ciphers beside her. Not only does she decide Stepmother’s duties, she inculcates in the children the significance of ghosts and curses (her own curses are legendary). Before her death, she tells Kiam the painful secret of how Father was conceived, and it takes a full-dress ceremony to exorcise her ghost.
A pleasant but unremarkable work of immigrant literature.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59051-215-4
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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