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61
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
35/100Critics
87/100Scholars
Author:
Fae Myenne Ng
Publisher:
Grove Press
Date:
May 9, 2023
Fae Myenne Ng was 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, the living legacy of the Exclusion Act. Orphan Bachelors weaves together the history of her family, lucky to exist and nevertheless doomed; it offers an elegy for brothers estranged and for elders lost, and insights into writing between languages and teaching between generations.
What The Reviewers Say
A powerful, deeply expressive memoir.
Might be likened to a figurative oil work, with structured lines building layers of her family’s history..
Ng’s Orphan Bachelors, an aching account of the author’s family in San Francisco’s Chinatown at the tail end of the Chinese Exclusion era, is an exemplar of the historical memoir.
Ng presents a luminous memoir, finding transformative, aching authenticity in revealing difficult lives.
