Book Review: Mambo in Chinatown by Jean Kwok

Mambo in Chinatown

Mambo in Chinatown by Jean Kwok is set in modern day America and has several ethnicities represented in its American story of immigrants old and new.

Book beginning:

My name is Charlie Wong and I'm the daughter of a dancer and a noodle-maker. My mother was once a star ballerina at the famed Beijing Dance Academy before she ran off to marry my father, the handsomest noodle-maker in Beijing - or at least that's what she always called him before she died. Hand in hand, they escaped to America to start their family. 

Page 56:

The dress was quite modest but revealed my neck and collarbones. I understood the moment Pa paused that I'd done wrong.
"Don't you like it?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"You look like a dancing girl," he said.
"Ma was one," Lisa said.
"Your mother was a dancer," he said. 

My comments:

Charlie Wong is American-born Chinese (ABC) and her parents were born in China (FOB - fresh off the boat. Don't you just love these acronyms!).

Charlie breaks out of a Manhattan Chinatown mold and enters the world of dance, a world her mother, a former Beijing Opera dancer, had introduced her to. Charlie meets Caucasians, American Blacks, Hispanics, and international dancers and changes her limited future to one that opens for new opportunities. She also helps her troubled younger sister Lisa to find optimism and her place in American society.

Informative look at some new Americans and some of the difficulties between the modern and the traditional cultures many young American immigrants face. Excellent characterizations and storytelling, Mambo in Chinatown pulls you into the world of a young woman inspired by her mother to make a better life for herself in America.

Friday 56 Rules:

 *Grab a book, any book. *Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader  *Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. *Post it. *Add your (url) post in Linky at Freda's Voice Also Book Beginnings by Rose City Reader.

China Dolls by Lisa See

First Chapter, First Paragraph is a weekly meme hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea.

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Miz B; choose two teaser sentences from a random page of your current read.

China Dolls

First paragraph:

I traveled west - alone - on the cheapest bus routes I could find. Every mile took me farther from Plain City, Ohio, where I'd been a flyspeck on the wallpaper of small town life. Each new state I passed through loosened another rope around my heart, my legs, my arms, yet my whole body ached and I couldn't shake my vertigo. I lived on aspirin, crackers, and soda pop. I cried and cried and cried. On the eighth day, California. Many hours after crossing the boundary, I got off the bus and pulled my sweater a little more tightly around me. I expected sun and warmth, but on that October afternoon, fog hung over San Francisco, damp, and shockingly cold. 

Picking up my suitcase, I left the bus station and started to walk. The receptionists at the cheap hotels I visited told me they were full. "Go to Chinatown," they suggested. "You can get a room there." I had no idea where Chinatown was, so that didn't help me. 

Teaser: 

The War Relocation Authority has your brother in an internment camp in Utah," Agent Parker went on. "If it were up to me, we'd keep you here until you told the truth -"

"I've told the truth," I said. (from an ARE; final copy may differ)

Book description:
Set in the "Chop Suey Circuit" of San Francisco right before World War II.
In 1938, Ruby, Helen and Grace, three girls from very different backgrounds, find themselves competing at the same audition for showgirl roles at San Francisco's exclusive "Oriental" nightclub, the Forbidden City. Grace, an American-born Chinese girl has fled the Midwest and an abusive father. Helen is from a Chinese family who have deep roots in San Francisco's Chinatown. And, as both her friends know, Ruby is Japanese passing as Chinese. At times their differences are pronounced, but the girls grow to depend on one another in order to fulfill their individual dreams. 

Then, everything changes in a heartbeat with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly the government is sending innocent Japanese to internment camps under suspicion, and Ruby is one of them. But which of her friends betrayed her? (publisher)
Published June 3, 2014; ARE  from Random House

Based on the teaser and first chapter of the book, would you keep reading? 

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

Everything I Never Told You

Title: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
To be published June 24, 2014; Penguin Press HC

Book description:
"A haunting debut novel about a mixed-race family living in 1970s Ohio and the tragedy that will either be their undoing or their salvation. Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . . So begins the story of this debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair.

 When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos. James, consumed by guilt, sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to find a responsible party, no matter what the cost. Lydia’s older brother, Nathan, is certain that the neighborhood bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it’s the youngest of the family—Hannah—who observes far more than anyone realizes and who may be the only one who knows the truth about what happened.

A gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another." (publisher)

I am intrigued by the book description of the plot involving this family and their tragedy. How about you? Would you wait for this book?

Book Review: Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself by Ann Mah

Kitchen Chinese: A Novel About Food, Family, and Finding Yourself by Ann Mah (Feb. 1, 2010)

Summary: Isabelle Lee is forced to leave her job as an editorial assistant at a swank New York magazine and decides to try her luck in Beijing, where her older sister Claire is practicing law. The two sisters were never very close but Claire invites Isabelle to stay in her spacious modern apartment in Beijing, and helps her get a job as a food writer for an English language magazine, Beijing NOW.

Claire gives her advice on how to interview a famous Chinese film director:Isabelle feels like a fish out of water as she doesn't speak Mandarin well, has no friends in the city, and still feels intimidated by her older sister, the successful Ivy League graduate and lawyer who has fulfilled all their parents' expectations, except one, that is. The sisters feel the pressure of their parents, even in far away Beijing, to marry a Han Chinese and provide grandchildren as soon as possible.

You don't know how I appreciate this, " I say in a rush.
In the car, Claire issues advice while simultaneously checking her BlackBerry, scanning the newspaper, and smoothing on another coat of lipstick. "Just be casual," she says, her voice as instructive as Dear Abby. "Men don't like it when women are too aggressive. Especially Chinese guys."

How the sisters deal with their parents, how Isabelle handles Beijing, her job writing on regional Chinese food,  and the attentions of Jeff, a Chinese rock singer, as well as the interest of a mysterious young American neighbor, Charlie, are the meat of the novel.

Comments: I loved traveling with Isabelle to places in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang to try out different styles of Chinese food. Her descriptions of the different kinds of "hot" in spicy Sechuan food made me want to try mapo tofu, bean curd cooked in hot chili oil. (The recipe is included in the back of the book, along with a few other dishes.)Here Isabelle takes her American friend Julia to breakfast in Hong Kong:

The conversation falters as we nibble dainty dumplings filled with shrimp peeping pale and pink through their translucent wrappers. We dive into plates of soy-sauce-scented rice noodles, unwrap bamboo leaves to reveal triangles of sticky rice....
"The food here is amazing. So fresh!" says Julia, her voice soft with awe. This is the best dimsum I've ever had. Ooh!" she exclaims, flagging down a passing cart. "Chicken feet!"

 I enjoyed Ann Mah's writing and the way she combined setting and regional cuisine in her story of the two Chinese-American sisters. I could relate to demands or expectations of parents, and the sometimes testy relationship between a younger and older sibling - these seem to be universal.

About the author: Ann Mah was born in California and lived in Beijing for four years, working as a dining manager for an English-language magazine. She was awarded a James Beard Culinary Scholarship in 2005 and now lives in Paris.

Challenges: 100+ Reading Challenge, China Challenge, Support your Local Library Challenge
Cym Lowell: Book Review Party Wednesday

Book Review: In the Shadow of the Cypress by Thomas Steinbeck

In the Shadow of the Cypress : A Novel  by Thomas Steinbeck (Hardcover - April 6, 2010)

 Yes, the author Thomas Steinbeck is the son of John Steinbeck. The younger Steinbeck refers to his famous father in the Epilogue of his book, which deals with the possible visit of Chinese fleets to the coast of California years before Columbus discovered America:

" It was my father, a fine historical scholar in his own right, who long ago first suggested to me that the Chinese had visited and explored the west coasts of the Americas long before Columbus discovered which side of the planet he was on. ....When I later learned that Chinese anchor stones, quarried in China, had been discovered in Monterey Bay, I came to realize that my father must have been instinctually correct."

In the Shadow of the Cypress is set in 1906 among the Chinese fishermen on the coast of California. After a horrific earthquake, an ancient Chinese jade seal and an inscribed plaque in three languages are discovered at the base of a giant uprooted cypress tree. The villagers try to keep the antiques but must compete with the major tongs in San Francisco for the artifacts. How they manage to keep them or not is the main theme of the novel. A century later, a young American scientist seeks the answer.

My comments: The novel is written in a formal, smooth style that is a pleasure to read. The premise of the book, that the fleets of Admiral Zheng reached the western coast before America was discovered by Columbus, has been the subject of several other novels that I know of. Steinbeck's story, set in Monterey and the northern coast of California, is unique in that he shows us the fishing culture of the early Chinese coastal villagers in that region.

The historical aspects of the book are very compelling. One thing that stood out for me is Steinbeck's claim that the cypress tree, which defines the northern Callifornia coast, (see the picture on the cover of the book). is not native to the U.S. or California, but is of Asian or Chinese origin. A mystery, indeed.

Thomas Steinbeck is also author of Down to a Soundless Sea (Ballantine Reader's Circle), 2003, a book about the settling of the Monterey Peninsula in the early 1900s.

Challenges: 100+ Reading Challenge, China Challenge, Support your Local Library Challenge

 

Steer Toward Rock by Fae Myenne Ng

Steer Toward Rock

A new novel by Fae Myenne Ng, American born Chinese, who writes about new Chinese immigrants and Chinese born Americans in California. Jack Moon Szeto is caught between the world of San Francisco and the world of old China, which follows him to this new country. Set in the 1960's, the novel deals with love and marriage, old traditions and the search for the new.

I am enjoying a very good book about a Chinese poet making a living as a chef in Georgia, by Ha Jin, A Free Life, which I am just about half way through. Next I'll start reading this new novel, Steer Toward Rock, published May 2008 by Hyperion. The immigrant experience once again, this time in San Francisco's China Town.