Fae Myenne Ng

 

 

https://ls.berkeley.edu/news/stories-can-migrate-another-landscape-author-lecturer-fae-myenne-ng-speaks-about-her-book

The Rescue Ship

https://lithub.com/all-stories-float-ashore-fae-myenne-ng-on-the-chinese-titanic-poet-sailor-deportee/

Orphan Bachelors 
By Fae Myenne Ng '78

 
After her seamstress mother tells her a story about her seafaring father, author and Chinatown native Fae Myenne Ng realized she had been entrusted "with a family story; I was no longer a child." Likewise, readers of Ng's memoir about the "orphan bachelors" of her title—a lost generation of men prevented from starting families by the Chinese Exclusion Act—are entrusted with a story as complex and nuanced as a Chinese puzzle box. Raised among these sympathetic men in the new land, Ng records their legacy and the way in which untold suffering resulting from immigration policy is handed down across the generations.
"[The orphan bachelors] called me a mouthy bird, and one by one, they shuffled off, their steps a Chinese American song of everlasting sorrow." 
A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ng was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for her first novel, Bone, and won the American Book Award for her second, Steer Toward Rock, both stories of remembrance about San Francisco Chinatown. A practicing artist in the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program at Berkeley, Ng emphasizes the significance of heritage. "I write about family; I teach my students how to escape theirs, that it's no crime," she writes.

 
—Danielle Shi  
 
 
 
 
 

 REVIEWS

"In our childhood, my sister and I heard no fairy tales, no love stories. We only heard tales of woe." 

Not just a family portrait, but also a powerful remembrance of the "orphan bachelors" of San Francisco, single men who arrived from China and, segregated by race and class, never found spouses and grew old in one another's company, never quite at home in a strange land.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/fae-myenne-ng/orphan-bachelors/

In this "book of living memory," ...the author's straightforward prose and the work's staggering scope bring home the myriad ways misguided policies damaged generations of immigrant families. Readers will be rapt.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780802162212

Ng presents a luminous memoir, finding transformative, aching authenticity in revealing difficult lives..

...her exceptional storytelling elucidates and illuminates.

https://www.booklistonline.com/Orphan-Bachelors/pid=9773186

One of the most moving chapters in the book tells the story of Ng moving to New York, where she was "instantly home," and her friendship with the painter Moira Dryer.
 
...beautifully written, powerfully informative and never boring. In her prologue, Ng warns: "When writing, consider the vessel of time that holds a story. Maybe that's also a guide on how to read this book. When reading, honor what you can't fully inhabit." Thanks to Ng's fierce talent and unapologetic honesty, "Orphan Bachelors" is a revelation. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/05/25/summer-memoirs-review-kwame-alexander-connie-wang/

A powerful, deeply expressive memoir. 

...fiery prose and deeply informed, nuanced perspective on one of the most caustic, exclusionist eras in history.

https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/review-chinese-american-daughters-reflect-family-17909701

Ng's strange, hilarious, highly specific accounts of her personal life, such as that of caring for her late brother Tim's pet tortoise Dewdrop, who she believes is a girl until his penis becomes enlarged due to a gallstone; subsequently, she calls him Mister Dewdrop. This story carries layers of meaning: Ng returns again and again to the idea of exclusion as a means of controlling the sexuality and reproductive choices of Asian people, a kind of metaphorical castration but also effectively as real as the operation Mister Dewdrop may be forced to undergo.

https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/4655/orphan-bachelors

All his life, Ng's father would say to her, "America didn't have to kill any Chinese; her [Exclusion] law assured none would be born."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/books/orphan-bachelors-fae-myenne-ng-meet-me-tonight-in-atlantic-city-jane-wong.html

Fae Myenne Ng's luminous, sometimes sorrowful, memoir recounts how racist U.S. immigration policies have shrouded four generations of her family in secrets and mystery.

Orphan Bachelors feels intimate and evocative, quiet rather than strident. Ng's grace as a storyteller makes it possible to understand in one's bones how heartless policy bends and misshapes lives for generations.

https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/orphan-bachelors-fae-myenne-ng-book-review/