Orphan Bachelors: Book summary and reviews of Orphan Bachelors by Fae Myenne Ng

Orphan Bachelors

A Memoir

by Fae Myenne Ng

Orphan Bachelors by Fae Myenne Ng X
Orphan Bachelors by Fae Myenne Ng
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  • Published May 2023
    256 pages
    Genre: Biography/Memoir

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Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Each of Ng's exquisite books, Bone (1993), Steer toward Rock (2008), now this, is worth the 15- year wait in-between… Ng presents a luminous memoir, finding transformative, aching authenticity in revealing difficult lives… Her exceptional storytelling elucidates and illuminates." ―Booklist (starred review)

"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." ―Publishers Weekly

"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." ―Gish Jen, author of The Resisters

"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." ―Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

"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." ―Maxine Hong Kingston, author of I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

"Ng 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." ―Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo

This information about Orphan Bachelors was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Fae Myenne Ng

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.

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