RaveThe AtlanticNg’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.
