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A Novel
by Abigail Savitch-Lew
Book Reviewed by:In the vein of Happiness Falls and Family Lore, a gripping story of family history and political upheaval centered around a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn and its impact on the neighborhood's Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century.
In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong.
Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. First is Koon Lai, an immigrant who runs a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue; second, his son Richard, a man desperate for his own chance at the American Dream; and third, Jason, a poet who seeks his escape in the bohemian counterculture of the 1970s, but finds himself an unwitting participant in Brooklyn's gentrification. In the 21st century, Jason's daughter Sadie returns to Brownsville as a journalist, determined to unravel the mystery of what happened decades earlier on the night the buildings blazed.
Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville's residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust.
A stunning debut from a new talent, Livonia Chow Mein contemplates how the American pursuit of freedom relies on a collective amnesia and challenges us to consider what it would take for us to truly live in harmony.
Excerpt
Livonia Chow Mein
Dry summer morning, 1978. Smell of squirrel piss. Swallows chirping from a newspaper nest above a doorway. A long day ahead, on streets made into lapping rivers from the flow of unscrewed fire hydrants, below a blue sky with clouds like soapsuds. A day of chin-ups on the DON'T WALK signs.
Two boys walk home from the corner store. Cutoff jean shorts, white tees, secondhand Adidas. The older one bounces his Spalding off the brick walls; the younger one digs his fingers into the box of corn flakes for the plastic prize.
A voice calls to them from a parallel-parked car on Rockaway Avenue.
"Hey boys."
Eyes twitch over. Hands close around the Spalding, crinkle-fold the cereal bag. The two boys look at each other and then take three snailish steps toward the open window of the Lincoln, the older with his arm flung horizontal like hazard tape across his brother's chest.
"You want to make a hundred bucks?"
In the gloom of the car, a pale hand: between two fingers, a flicker ...
Livonia Chow Mein is an ambitious novel, and one that requires well-deserved attention on the part of readers. The narrative shifts frequently among characters—including Lida, Sadie, and various members of Sadie's family, among others—and time frames... The novel's strong emotional core will reward and resonate with diligent readers, and there's certainly no shortage of weighty topics for book clubs to discuss and debate...continued
Full Review
(611 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, the community organizer at the heart of Abigail Savitch-Lew's debut novel Livonia Chow Mein, knows she's landed on a solution to the skyrocketing real estate prices and rampant speculation that are displacing Black and Brown folks in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. Now if only she can get the decision-makers to pay attention…
Lina's proposed solution is one that is gaining momentum not only in New York City but across the country: the community land trust. Community land trusts offer an alternate framework for property ownership that also addresses the housing affordability crisis.
In the community land trust (CLT) model, the trust—usually a nonprofit organization governed by a board made...
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