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.
A powerful, deeply expressive memoir ... "Orphan Bachelors"... isn’t always cohesive. Inspirations for classroom lectures sit alongside deep-seated thoughts about her relationship with her mother, for example. But if that’s the way Ng’s brain works, so be it. With her fiery prose and deeply informed, nuanced perspective on one of the most caustic, exclusionist eras in history, I’d follow her anywhere.
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 has enriched the environment further by attending to linguistic subtleties. She understands what language can reveal about identity formation ... The storyteller’s delusion, as Ng puts it in Orphan Bachelors, is the belief that if you tell the story right, you will be understood. It may be an impossible task, but with this latest endeavor, she is getting closer.
