Orphan Bachelors: A Memoir
From the bestselling and award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng's Orphan Bachelors is an extraordinary memoir of her beloved San Francisco's Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion In pre-Communist China, Fae Myenne Ng's father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger's son, evading the Exclusion Act, an immigration law which he believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family. During the McCarthy era, he entered the Confession Program in a failed attempt to salvage his marriage only to have his citizenship revoked to resident alien.
Work Information
From the bestselling and award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng's Orphan Bachelors is an extraordinary memoir of her beloved San Francisco's Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion In pre-Communist China, Fae Myenne Ng's father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger's son, evading the Exclusion Act, an immigration law which he believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family.
From the bestselling and award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng's Orphan Bachelors is an extraordinary memoir of her beloved San Francisco's Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion In pre-Communist China, Fae Myenne Ng's father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger's son, evading the Exclusion Act, an immigration law which he believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family. During the McCarthy era, he entered the Confession Program in a failed attempt to salvage his marriage only to have his citizenship revoked to resident alien. Exclusion and Confession, America's two slamming doors. As Ng's father said, "America didn't have to kill any Chinese, the Exclusion Act ensured none would be born." Ng was her parents' precocious first born, the translator, the bossy eldest sister. A child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by San Francisco's Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors -- men without wives or children, Exclusion's living legacy. She and her siblings were their stand-in descendants, Ng's family grocery store their haven. Each Orphan Bachelor bequeathed the children their true American inheritance. Ng absorbed their suspicious, lonely, barren nature; she found storytelling and chosen children in the form of her students. Exclusion's legacy followed her from the back alleys of Chinatown in the 60s, to Manhattan in the 80s, to the high desert of California in the 90s, until her return home in the 2000s when the untimely deaths of her youngest brother and her father devastated the family. A a child, Ng believed her father's lies; as an adult, she returned to her childhood home to write his truth. Orphan Bachelors weaves together the history of one family, lucky to exist and nevertheless doomed; an elegy for brothers estranged and for elders lost; and insights into writing between languages and teaching between generations. It also features Cantonese profanity, snakes that cure fear and opium that conquers sorrow, and a seemingly immortal creep of tortoises. In this powerful remembrance, Fae Myenne Ng gives voice to her valiant ancestors, her bold and ruthless Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self, howling in Cantonese, impossible to translate but determined to be heard.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Grove Press
- Published
- 2024-05-21
- Pages
- 256 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.72 x 2.03 x 20.83 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780802163356
- ISBN-10
- 0802163351
- Price
- 3394 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Biographies & Memoirs/Cultural & Regional
CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS GOLD MEDAL WINNER FOR NONFICTION From the bestselling and award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock , Fae Myenne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors is an extraordinary memoir of her beloved San Francisco’s Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion In pre-Communist China, Fae Myenne Ng’s father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger’s son, evading the Exclusion Act, an immigration law which he believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family. During the McCarthy era, he entered the Confession Program in a failed attempt to salvage his marriage only to have his citizenship revoked to resident alien. Exclusion and Confession, America’s two slamming doors. As Ng’s father said, “America didn’t have to kill any Chinese, the Exclusion Act ensured none would be born.” Ng was her parents' precocious first born, the translator, the bossy eldest sister. A child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by San Francisco’s Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors -- men without wives or children, Exclusion’s living legacy. She and her siblings were their stand-in descendants, Ng’s family grocery store their haven. Each Orphan Bachelor bequeathed the children their true American inheritance. Ng absorbed their suspicious, lonely, barren nature; she found storytelling and chosen children in the form of her students. Exclusion’s legacy followed her from the back alleys of Chinatown in the 60s, to Manhattan in the 80s, to the high desert of California in the 90s, until her return home in the 2000s when the untimely deaths of her youngest brother and her father devastated the family. A a child, Ng believed her father’s lies; as an adult, she returned to her childhood home to write his truth. Orphan Bachelors weaves together the history of one family, lucky to exist and nevertheless doomed; an elegy for brothers estranged and for elders lost; and insights into writing between languages and teaching between generations. It also features Cantonese profanity, snakes that cure fear and opium that conquers sorrow, and a seemingly immortal creep of tortoises. In this powerful remembrance, Fae Myenne Ng gives voice to her valiant ancestors, her bold and ruthless Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self, howling in Cantonese, impossible to translate but determined to be heard.
FAE MYENNE NG is the author of bestseller and PEN/Faulkner Fiction finalist Bone and American Book Award winner Steer Toward Rock . Her work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, Ploughshares , and anthologized in Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction , Literature Across Cultures, The PEN Short Fiction Project , and The Pushcart Prize . She has been the recipient of fellowships from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Guggenheim, the Lannan Foundation, the NEA, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She teaches creative writing and literature in UC Berkeley’s Department of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies.
Reviews
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As someone who has taught and written about Asian American literature for decades I am in awe of many works, but few could resonate with me (a Hong Konger of Cantonese descent) as much as Fae Myenne Ng's ORPHAN BACHELORS. I am agog at the scene about the father traveling to HK by sea to obtain snake gall (used in TCM) to cure his wife's sickness—the kind of searing detail FMG could etch into the reader’s consciousness. The context: the mother was traumatized upon witnessing a grandfather who’d hanged himself in a hotel room. The father, a seaman of lowly rank with 95 relations to care for, sneaked out when the ship was docked in HK harbor to obtain the potent cure to restore his wife’s courage. A virtuoso nonverbal expression of affection peculiar to outwardly brash and raucous Cantonese, especially telling in a couple that could never stop bickering. A must-read for anyone interested in learning the personal repercussions of the Asian Exclusion Laws and the relentless persecution of Chinese immigrants during the Red Scare, in writing aching prose that zips and zooms with Cantonese cadence and humor, or in appreciating the heroic Cantonese American tradition. This historically informed yet intimate memoir pulsates with the author’s big heart, and that of her extensive family. (One of the brothers died, incidentally, of a “big heart.”) No less precious is the wisdom that transpires. May we all savor life like that brother’s pet tortoises—taan sai gaai—a Cantonese idiom that defies translation, even into Mandarin; literally, “bask in the cosmos.” King-Kok Cheung
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Compelling history
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So many levels to this memoir, so many moments of crystalline purity, so much wild laughter, so much wisdom. The Orphan Bachelors of the title,doomed by a devastating injustice codified in law, frame the story but do not limit it. Yes. It's a story of immigrants struggling to survive and thrive in San Francisco's Chinatown. That is a painful account of outer circumstance. Look deeper, into the ways that this particular family brought ancestral teachings into their changed surroundings: what survived, and what they left behind (in the father's terse reply, "unbearable".) The mother's qualities: courage, détermination, endurance, were matched in the father with the addition of a kind of crazy wisdom, a defiance of practical circumstance. Against the odds, they bore and nurtured precious children. Ng's love for her sister and brothers is one of the threads that illuminates her memories. This is also a story of language and its purposes, of what to tell and when, and what to conceal. Unwrapping her father's false passport to this country, the Book of Lies, gives rise to Ng's fearless pursuit of truth The author's observations, her sharp eye and sharp ear, bring her surroundings to life and memorialize not only a particular time and place, but a timeless wisdom. Her gift is to both to retain and to transform, as she finds new, creative ways to honor the past, to mourn and to celebrate. Orphan Bachelors is worthy of reading and re-reading. Each paragraph tunnels into a treasure of discoveries and emerges into light.
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This memoir is a piece of life itself. It shares and celebrates stories showcasing sacrifice, laughter, secrecy, and grit. I took this memoir with me while traveling to China with my mother. While there, she always asked me to read her "Orphan Bachelors" during our free time while commuting through taxis or even the subway. My mother doesn't really enjoy books written in English, but I think the record has finally been broken. In fact, my mother and I were so immersed in the story that sometimes we would even forget to get off when the train when we needed to. To read "Orphan Bachelors" is to experience life in all its honesty, the good and the bad.
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Orphan Bachelors: A Memoir is a triumph. Fae Myenne Ng deftly weaves the horrific saga of what Asian immigrants have endured with a beautifully told personal story. I love the way the structure mimics the mosaic patterns on the back of the tortoises she lovingly cares for after her brother’s death. She moves with ease between past and present, family and history, reflections on work and the mothering of her non-biological children. All expand our understanding of the world.