Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

ORPHAN BACHELORS

Fae Myenne Ng

On Being a Confession Baby, Chinatown Daughter, Baa-Bai Sister, Caretaker of Exotics, Literary Balloon Peddler, and Grand Historian of a Doomed American Family

An extraordinary memoir of the author's 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. 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 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.

Available products
Book Published 2023-05-09 by Grove Press

Comments

Fae Myenne Ng chose to be a writer because, she felt, "I had the gung fu for it." She sure did. She's written a black belt of a book. Reading her vivid narration of her family's endless balancing act of being Chinese and American, I suddenly run into what sounds like a haiku. That's how lyrical her writing is, sometimes as musical as Cantonese poetry, other times as harsh as the Toishan dialect, employed in curses like "Wow your mother!" or "Dai pow," meaning "pulling a big gun," or telling a good story. Fae tells a good story. Pow! Wow!

Luminous ... 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. An exemplary study of the past brought into the present, spanning years and continents.

Haunted by the Orphan Bachelors' never-born progeny, Fae Myenne Ng births a future by remembering them, their lived desires and endurance, honoring and inscribing their lives into the poetic songs and ancestral tablet that is this memoir. How many years ago, Ng penned the unforgettable and luminous novel, BONE, and today we are gifted with ORPHAN BACHELORS. The circle closes.

A wonderful memoir. By turns horrifying, hilarious and moving, ORPHAN BACHELORS is a book that needed to be written. I was mesmerized by its intensity and haunted by its candor; it grips the reader and does not let go.

Orphan Bachelors" is so many treasures at once: an enthralling memoir, an act of reckoning, a history of American exclusion and Chinatown resilience, an attempt to conjure the vast horizons that her forebears were never allowed to imagine. ORPHAN BACHELORS is the culmination of Ng's brilliant career.

No one else has written about the Exclusion era with such tenderness, intimacy, and hard-core fury. Sharp, bitter, tender, and funny, ORPHAN BACHELORS teases out profound truths that vibrate with a bitter history, making my teeth chatter with anguish, curiosity, dismay. A helluva book.

Intimate and evocative ... Ng's grace as a storyteller makes it possible to understand in one's bones how heartless policy bends and misshapes lives for generations.

Aha! So that's what became of the men who went to sea. Aha! So that's what that word - that sound - means. Oh, so I am not alone. Fae Myenne Ng's memoir helps the reader recover memories, and to know lost history.

ORPHAN BACHELORS redefines memoir. Ng digs deep into ancestral bones, raw family wounds, historical and contemporary societal trauma, even exotic animal life - weaving a riveting and profound exploration into her essential self. A mind-expanding memoir that I will read again and again.

Fae Myenne Ng's memoir documents the personal legacy of her own family, as well as that of the Chinese community fractured by immigration policy. History is a never-ending story that twists backwards and forward like a wild dragon. We have only to look at our current immigration record, locally and globally, to see that this story is still happening.

They told minority writers of the 1940s and 50s that in order to succeed they had to write for the mainstream which meant for some writing books in which all of the characters were white. Writers were urged to keep their ethnicity in the background or be marginalized. Fae Myenne Ng calls her memoir ORPHAN BACHELORS an 'alien book.' She is part of a literary revolt that argued that it is not enough to be patted on the head for writing beautifully, which she does, but like Ng, one can be the archivist and librarian of the communities' stories before they become extinct. Fae Myenne Ng continues to be among the globe's finest writers.

Fae Myenne Ng's memoir is devastating in its account of the human costs of the Chinese Exclusion Act and how those played out in one tough but beleaguered family. Her writing is flinty but openhearted, blessedly direct but charged with poetry that rises straight from experience. There is not one ounce of fat in this book, not a grain of self-pity or sentimentality or rhetoric. It is a wonder.

A luminous memoir, finding transformative, aching authenticity in revealing difficult lives ... Her exceptional storytelling elucidates and illuminates.