Book Review: ‘Orphan Bachelors,’ by Fae Myenne Ng; ‘Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City,’ by Jane Wong

admin May 14, 2023

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The Orphan Bachelor: A Memoirby Fei Mienne Ng
See you tonight in Atlantic City: a memoirby Jane Wong

My earliest community memory is walking around my home town in northern China with my mother and grandparents and being greeted with “Have you eaten?” I assure you from my friends and acquaintances, and to all of you, that:“ Decades later, when my grandfather died suddenly in the COVID-19 pandemic before China reopened its borders, my mother took refuge in her home kitchen in New Jersey, cooking until dawn every night. Stir-fries, soups, and sweets popped up on my doorstep just a few miles away.text message to cell phone: “have you eaten? “

In many Asian-American homes, love and food go hand in hand. Instead of saying they love us, our parents feed us while preventing physical hunger while the emotional hunger rages on. Her two memoirs, Fei Mienne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors and Jane Wong’s Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, explore the different forms of hunger that come with living as an Asian in America. increase.

Celebrating the full depth of both memoirs in a single review is no more possible than fully celebrating the richness of their Asian-American and Pacific Islander heritage in a month. Both Ng and Wong are second-generation Americans with ancestral roots in Tuixiang, Guangdong province in southern China. But they grew up on opposite coasts of America, nearly 30 years apart. Ng in the 1950s and ’60s in San Francisco, where his family ran a grocery store, and Wong in the 1980s and ’90s in New Jersey, where his parents ran a grocery store. Chinese restaurant. Each writer brilliantly paints his own story. But while novelist Eun’s story might be likened to a figurative oil painting in which structured lines build layers of her family’s history, poet Wong’s book is reminiscent of an abstract watercolor painting. , free-flowing, non-linear and without clear boundaries.

This linguistic proficiency causes strain on both authors, who are limited by their American upbringing to English, what Ng calls the “language of the barbarians” and Wong the “language of the colonies.” I am outraged. In 1940, Ng’s father arrived in the United States as a “paper son,” disguised as an unrelated Chinese-American child and entered the United States despite the Anti-Exclusion Act. “When his father said, day boat“I pronounced the word deportation in creaking syllables like a door opening and closing,” she writes, “feeling the order.” She added, “‘Deportation’ was the first English word I heard her father speak, and it is also the first English word for me.” When Ms. Wong’s mother was pregnant with herself and her brother Stephen, she asked a random customer at a family restaurant what the baby’s name was. She wanted me to give it an English name so it would “get along”. Wong wants to be familiar with her Chinese name, and she asks her mother to say it again because her memory of it has faded. Hearing this, she recalls: “My Chinese name opens like an old jar of fermented garlic. ‘Can you say that again?’ I will ask. “

Caught in the language that brought their respective parents to their knees, Wong and Ng seek parallels in artistic community from Asian-American literature. Teresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Dicty” helped Mr. Wong understand that “for someone who comes from a history of trauma, war and immigration, storytelling is never a linear act.” Reading Dictee gave me permission to create a speculative collection of memories. ‘ Ng discovered that ‘eat a cup of tea’. Louis Chu, ‘give life to my Toisha people’, ‘fearless’ and ‘uninhibited’ language, ‘shouting rather than speaking’. These texts also provided authors with new ways to break free from racism, imperialism, and misogyny of being Asian-American women. Ng calls Mei Oi, the protagonist of Eat a Bowl of Tea, an “erotic avenger of exclusion.” She demands sex in retaliation for childless wives left in empty marital beds in China and orphaned singles living sexless lives in America. And through the lens of Cha’s brutal rape and murder shortly after the publication of Dictie in 1982, Wong explores the violence Asian American women experience today: being treated and blamed.” She asked, “Did we ever know our bodies were safe?”

Both the bodies of Ng and Wong are known to be suffering from various forms of hunger, inheriting their ancestors’ “insatiable” appetites for connection as well as food and water. Their bodies have endured male aggression and reproductive pain. Wong’s “memory of a man biting her nipple so hard it made her bleed. Another man’s hand holding her neck in a vortex of power and violence,” and Ng’s menstrual cycle “muscles.” It was a cramping, debilitating, fetal cramping, painful marathon.” Of her decision not to have children, Ng wrote: “Exclusion extinguished my desire to enter a delusional immortal community for offspring.”

There is also the hunger of grief. Ng’s mother, her brother, and her father died in quick succession. In the case of a father who had separated from Wong when he was a teenager. A series of former lovers following Wong’s adulthood. And most of all, the bond with her hometown that fades with each loss of her loved ones.

Throughout her life, Ms. Ng’s father said, “America never had to kill a single Chinese. America never had to kill a Chinese. Her laws ensured that no one was born.” Is there anything more rebellious in the world than the act of eating, the act of staying alive? At a restaurant in New York City’s Chinatown, Ng felt that her food “brought me home,” and her warm jokes reminded her of her mother’s “homemade baby food.” rice field. And with a bowl of juke she learned to make herself, Ms. Wong “thinks about how I can finally feed my loved ones,” adding, “Everything I eat is what I live for.” It reminds me that I am.”

Qian Julie Wang is the author of Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood and managing partner of the educational rights law firm Gottlieb & Wang LLP.