Product Description

"We were a family of three girls. By Chinese standards, that wasn't lucky. In Chinatown, everyone knew our story. Outsiders jerked their chins, looked at us, shook their heads. We heard things."

In this profoundly moving novel, Fae Myenne Ng takes readers into the hidden heart of San Francisco's Chinatown, to the world of one family's honor, their secrets, and the lost bones of a "paper father." Two generations of the Leong family live in an uneasy tension as they try to fathom the source of a brave young girl's sorrow.

Oldest daughter Leila tells the story: of her sister Ona, who has ended her young, conflicted life by jumping from the roof of a Chinatown housing project; of her mother Mah, a seamstress in a garment shop run by a "Chinese Elvis"; of Leon, her father, a merchant seaman who ships out frequently; and the family's youngest, Nina, who has escaped to New York by working as a flight attendant. With Ona and Nina gone, it is up to Leila to lay the bones of the family's collective guilt to rest, and find some way to hope again.

Fae Myenne Ng's luminous debut explores what it means to be a stranger in one's own family, a foreigner in one's own neighborhood--and whether it's possible to love a place that may never feel quite like home.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1874596 in Books
• Published on: 1993-01-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 194 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This remarkable first novel chronicles a believable journey through pain to healing, exposing the emotional scars--the bleeding hearts and aching kinship bones--of its characters as they try to survive. The Leong family, based in San Francisco's Chinatown, includes three daughters: educator/community-relations specialist Leila, the narrator; restaurant hostess Ona, whose troubled life ends tragically in early adulthood; and Nina, who eventually takes off for New York, where she works as a flight attendant. Heading the clan (in an idiosyncratic, maddening fashion) are mother Mah, a seamstress who owns a baby clothing store, and father Leon, a merchant seaman who lives apart from his wife in an SRO-type hotel, keeping his "Going-Back-to-China Money" in a brown bag. Ng summons a quiet urgency from simple language, both in her physical descriptions (such as that of the office of the Hoy Sun Ning Yung Benevolent Association) and in her depictions of the characters' seesawing thoughts and feelings as they move between the Chinese- and English-speaking cultures. She ventures outside the Leong household less often than one might wish, but she lucidly renders those secondary characters, notably Leila's beau, Mason Louie, a mechanic who strives to understand and embrace her relatives but also hopes to convince her to establish a separate family with him. Ng reveals his insight into Leila's moodiness thus: "He says my anger is like flooding--too much gas, killing the engine." With such brilliant details, and in the larger picture of how death and life inform one another, this writer makes a stunning debut. Major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In sharp contrast to the overdramatized lives of Chinese Americans in Amy Tan's work, Ng's simply written first novel is totally without sensationalism. Yet because her characters are depicted so realistically, the reader cannot but be moved by the hopes, grief, and quarrels of two generations of Chinese Americans in San Francisco's Chinatown. Mah, who has worked hard all her life in garment sweatshops, finally is able to own her baby-clothing store. Her husband, Leon, who used to be a merchant seaman, worked two shifts in ships' laundry rooms to provide for his family. Nevertheless, the family is torn apart after Ona, the middle daughter, jumps from the tallest building in Chinatown. The bones of contention and bones of inheritance come together in great turmoil as Nina, the youngest daughter, leaves Chinatown for New York City and then Leila, the oldest, marries and moves out to the suburbs. Leon, the paper son to old Leung, fails to keep his promise to take Leung's bones back to China. Thus, a family's tragedy is cast in greater historical context, and the reader is rewarded with a rich reading experience. Recommended for all libraries.
- Cherry W. Li, Los Angeles
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Brutal and poignant, dreamy and gritty, specific to its place and resonant in its implication about what it means to be an American."-- "Seattle Times/Post-Intelligence""An incantory first novel . . . [Ms. Ng] is blessed with a poet's gift for metaphor and a reporter's eye for detail."-- Michiko Kakutani, "New York Times""With the magic of art, this freshly beautiful, new young writer hastaken strands of lives and experiences central to our understandings ofour country, our time--for many of us, ourselves--and out of passionate caring, astonishing mature comprehension, has interwoven them into thisone seamless, luminous book--to read and reread." -- Tillie Olsen"Bone is written in a perfectly clear, undecorated prose that stops the eye at every sentence. Simply by telling the unadorned facts of the story, Ms. Ng makes it clear that moving across town to a new neighborhood can be, in its own way, as hard as crossing the Pacific Ocean.' -- "New York Times Book Review""The wiry, unpretentious prose of Bone exhibits sustained emotional power. . . It clearly announces the emergence of an impressive talent on the landscape of the American novel." -- "Boston Globe""An extraordinary first novel . . . A hopeful, charming, and surprisingly joyous work." -- "Chicago Tribune"