ORPHAN BACHELORS

The noted fiction writer turns to memoir in this decade-spanning account of Chinese immigrant experiences in America.

“In our childhood, my sister and I heard no fairy tales, no love stories. We only heard tales of woe.” So writes San Francisco–born Ng, whose parents—“a seamstress who could sew up copies of dresses from sight alone, a sailor who could endure the silence and solace of the seas”—came from China with memories of pain and hunger. Years after arriving in America, her mother would calculate the cost of every meal, including externalities like the gas expended in cooking it, while her father recalled that on the ship that brought him across the ocean, he could mark time by the single hard-boiled egg given to each passenger every Sunday. More, Ng’s father had to memorize a “Book of Lies,” answers to damning questions that sneaky immigration authorities would raise in quizzing new arrivals to weed out the Chinese, who were barely tolerated after decades of exclusion. Father and daughter forged a bond over languages. In one affecting passage, the author writes of her father’s insisting that any discarded paper with writing on it be placed in a special receptacle to be taken to a temple that burned it as sacred material. In another, she recounts the hilarious transcriptions her mother used to pronounce English words—e.g., “Gum bao sui pei (gold precious water fart) was ‘Campbell’s Soup.’ ” A luminous West Coast bookend to Ava Chin’s Mott Street, Ng’s book is 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.