From the bestselling and award-winning author of novels Bone and
Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng's Orphan Bachelors is an
extraordinary memoir of her 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.
