Orphan Bachelors : : a Memoir on Being a Confession Baby, Chinatown Daughter, Baa-Bai Sister, Caretaker of Exotics, Literary Balloon Peddler, and Grand Historian of a Doomed American Family
Book - 2023 921 Ng, Fae Myenne, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / Literary / Ng, Fae Myenne 3 On Shelf No requests on this item
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Call Number: 921 Ng, Fae Myenne, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / Literary / Ng, Fae Myenne
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Traverwood Branch, Westgate Branch
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Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout |
921 Ng, Fae Myenne | 4-week checkout | On Shelf |
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Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout |
Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / Literary / Ng, Fae Myenne | 4-week checkout | On Shelf |
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Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout |
Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / Literary / Ng, Fae Myenne | 4-week checkout | On Shelf |
"From the bestselling, award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng's Orphan Bachelors is a singular memoir of her beloved San Francisco's Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion. Beloved by readers for her "incantatory" (New York Times) novels and their luminous depictions of Chinatown, Fae Myenne Ng's new memoir is a personal, timely portrait of the same storied place. In pre-Communist China, 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 only to have his citizenship revoked. Ng was her parents' precocious firstborn. A child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors-men without wives or children, Exclusion's living legacy. Exclusion's shadow followed Ng from the back alleys of Chinatown in the sixties, to Manhattan in the eighties, to the high desert of California in the nineties, until her return home in the 2000s when the deaths of her youngest brother and her father devastated the family. As 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 doomed family; an elegy for brothers estranged and for elders lost; and insights into writing between languages and teaching between generations. In this powerful remembrance, Ng gives voice to her ancestors, her Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self, howling in Cantonese, impossible to translate but determined to be heard"-- Provided by publisher.
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PUBLISHED
New York : Grove Press, 2023.
Year Published: 2023
Description: 244 p.
Language: English
Format: Book
ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
9780802162212
0802162215
SUBJECTS
Ng, Fae Myenne, -- 1956-
Chinese American authors -- Biography.
Chinese American families -- Biography.
Chinatown (San Francisco, Calif.) -- Biography.
Autobiographies.