This fiction piece is set in New York and China and is about the experiences of an undocumented Chinese immigrant mother who is detained in an immigration facility and ultimately deported. Her American-born son doesn’t know what happened to her and is adopted by a White American couple. There are themes relating to exploitative labor practices, cultural assimilation, language assimilation, racial exclusion, identity and belonging, and other connected issues. The book exceeds the page limit, but still is an engaging read. Given our current political context, there is much to connect to cross-campus activities. It has received much acclaim, including a PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
This book is gripping and painful. It’s also a must-read during this era of family separations, deportations, problematic transracial adoptions, and white-guilt/liberal racism. The book takes place in bustling New York City, in cold and isolated upstate NY, and in both rural and urban Fuzhou, China. Twenty-one year-old Deming Guo undergoes multiple journeys and culture shocks as he moves from NYC to China and back several times in his short life. Issues such as identity and naming which are hugely important to first and second generation Asian Americans are discussed in this book. The forced erasure of an ethnicity, language, culture, and ultimately identity (very real to those who must live as outsiders in a white world) is heart-wrenching. Deming’s mother, Polly Guo, the second protagonist, strays from the commonly written overbearing Chinese mother and instead is feisty, pragmatic, and struggling to survive as an undocumented and exploited laborer while raising a young child. While the book seems dreary (and some of it is), there are scenes of love and lust and intensity that make it impossible to put down. I think this book fits interdisciplinary courses in Ethnic and American Studies, but books like these are essential the mainstream. I think this could work for the Campus Reading Program, except it feels long (and exceeds the page limit by almost 10%).
This compelling novel does an excellent job of conveying a Chinese-American boy’s experience growing up in the United States. Its treatment of the boy/man’s identity issues are especially good, and the quality of the writing is quite strong. Unfortunately, the book is very long. It comes in at over 358 pages, and those pages are not the kind that can be skimmed over. I’ve just finished part I, which took me four hours, and I’m a fast reader. Even if the book came in under our 300-page limit guideline, I’m still not sure we could expect our first-years to read it.
This fiction piece is set in New York and China and is about the experiences of an undocumented Chinese immigrant mother who is detained in an immigration facility and ultimately deported. Her American-born son doesn’t know what happened to her and is adopted by a White American couple. There are themes relating to exploitative labor practices, cultural assimilation, language assimilation, racial exclusion, identity and belonging, and other connected issues. The book exceeds the page limit, but still is an engaging read. Given our current political context, there is much to connect to cross-campus activities. It has received much acclaim, including a PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
This book is gripping and painful. It’s also a must-read during this era of family separations, deportations, problematic transracial adoptions, and white-guilt/liberal racism. The book takes place in bustling New York City, in cold and isolated upstate NY, and in both rural and urban Fuzhou, China. Twenty-one year-old Deming Guo undergoes multiple journeys and culture shocks as he moves from NYC to China and back several times in his short life. Issues such as identity and naming which are hugely important to first and second generation Asian Americans are discussed in this book. The forced erasure of an ethnicity, language, culture, and ultimately identity (very real to those who must live as outsiders in a white world) is heart-wrenching. Deming’s mother, Polly Guo, the second protagonist, strays from the commonly written overbearing Chinese mother and instead is feisty, pragmatic, and struggling to survive as an undocumented and exploited laborer while raising a young child. While the book seems dreary (and some of it is), there are scenes of love and lust and intensity that make it impossible to put down. I think this book fits interdisciplinary courses in Ethnic and American Studies, but books like these are essential the mainstream. I think this could work for the Campus Reading Program, except it feels long (and exceeds the page limit by almost 10%).
This compelling novel does an excellent job of conveying a Chinese-American boy’s experience growing up in the United States. Its treatment of the boy/man’s identity issues are especially good, and the quality of the writing is quite strong. Unfortunately, the book is very long. It comes in at over 358 pages, and those pages are not the kind that can be skimmed over. I’ve just finished part I, which took me four hours, and I’m a fast reader. Even if the book came in under our 300-page limit guideline, I’m still not sure we could expect our first-years to read it.