Old family stories are hard to revivify, even when they’re good family stories ... This is the problem Ava Chin is up against in her sensitive, ambitious, well-reported, heavily peopled yet curiously remote memoir-cum-history ... It’s a book that has everything going for it except that intangible spark that crisp and confident storytelling throws off. The air is a bit still in this book, as if one is walking behind the docent on a long museum tour ... The story has a certain pageantry ... This memoir evokes emotion but, as with the made-up dialogue, Chin sometimes doesn’t trust her readers to absorb it on their own.
The book is prefaced with a family tree, which, at least for the first few chapters, the reader will need to repeatedly consult to keep the many narrative reins straight, for Chin’s book doesn’t adhere to a strictly linear telling. It bobs and weaves between the late-19th and early-20th centuries and the present day, often within the space of a single chapter ... Less successful when it awkwardly strains for a kind of grandiloquent universality ... In their abstraction...rhetorical questions cumulatively threaten to undercut the personal force of the book.
Admirable and deeply researched ... The book shines a harsh and unforgiving light on this country’s legacy of racist policies ... Her book is an important read for those interested in learning about the origins of some of today’s most hard-line immigration policy proposals in America.
Chin probes the plight of four generations of her ancestors with the tenacity of a historian, the fine brush of an accomplished artist, and the sensitivity of one who openly communicates with the dead ... While this is the story of her ancestors, one of the unexpected gifts is that we hear Chin’s voice throughout, in the italicized dialogue she fabricates to add texture to her story, in her personal responses to what her family endured, and in her spine-tingling interactions with the spirits of those who have passed.
Deeply researched ... Grapples with the emotional legacy of exclusion in a way that many of the more traditional histories of the Chinese American experience have been unable to ... Ms. Chin has written a deeply empathetic and important book, one that renders visible the hidden achievements and sufferings of her family members—and insists that the wounding history of exclusion be seen clearly as well.
Stunning ... Deeply researched and superbly told, this sweeping saga is sure to become required reading for those seeking to understand America’s past and present. Readers will be rapt.
