Eastwind Summer Book Club: Orphan Bachelors

Eastwind Books of Berkeley has been serving the public providing books on Asian American diverse cultures, Ethnic Studies, history, and literature since 1982. Celebrating more than 20 years in Berkeley, Eastwind Books of Berkeley has provided the public with meaningful and relevant books for our times. Eastwind supports and promotes various authors at book events including:The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons,Other: An Asian Pacific Islander Prisoners Anthology, andPalestine...it is something colonial. Visit us in-store at 2066 University Avenue, Berkeley or online atwww.asiabookcenter.com.

Eastwind Books of Berkeley

Join us for our second annual Summer Book Club where we’ll be discussing Fae Myenne Ng’s intimate and striking memoir Orphan Bachelors!

Join us for an heartfelt discussion on Orphan Bachelors, the Fae Myenne Ng's award-winning memoir on being a confession baby, Chinatown daughter, baa-bai sister, caretaker of exotics, literary balloon peddler, and grand historian of a doomed American family.Please RSVP for the Zoom link. This will be a virtual event, so come in your comfiest clothes and have your favorite snacks on hand. We encourage you to finish the book before the event, but you’re more than welcome to join us no matter how far you’ve read. We look forward to seeing you! There is also a special book club sale for the book on our <a href="https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p4899/Orphan_Bachelors%3A_A_Memoir_%28Paperback%29.html" title="https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p4899/Orphan_Bachelors%3A_A_Memoir_%28Paperback%29.html" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">website</a>. The paperback is $5 off for book club attendees!About the BookIn 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. A 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.

Eastwind Summer Book Club: Orphan Bachelors

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Eastwind Summer Book Club: Orphan Bachelors

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