Fae Myenne Ng is an American writer, professor, and an early pioneer in launching Asian fiction to the American canon. In the early years of her career, she won a Pushcart Prize in 1987 for A Red Sweater and received the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award in 1988 for The First Dead Man and Others. Her first novel, Bone, was a finalist for the 1994 PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award. The second, Steer Toward Rock, was awarded the 2008 American Book Award.
Her newest work is a memoir, Orphan Bachelors, which takes readers back to a 1960s Chinatown in San Francisco that does not exist anymore. Consider reading her memoir a chance to time travel back to the era where the summer of love took over.
The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. barred Chinese men from starting a family on American soil. Ng’s Big Aunt paid $4,000 ($82,000 today) for her father to become a paper son, thwarting the Chinese Exclusion Act. Soon, the paper son revealed his book of lies through the 1966 Chinese Confession Program, risking for consequences by revealing both paper families and bloodlines. Redeemed through the Chinese Confession Program and granted residency, there was a hidden cost. The status does not rewind the effects of exclusion that impacted Ng’s family for the rest of their lives as other Chinese families in America.
As Ng recounts her family history in a vulnerable manner, she addresses the history of anti-Asian violence in the United States in a different tone.
What about the mass lynchings when 17 Chinese men in Los Angeles were hung in 1871? That man who lost his head in Denver’s Chinatown in 1880 by the rioters? The 28 massacred in Jackson Springs in 1885? The 31 miners murdered in Tacoma in 1887? The Cleveland Elementary shooting in Stockton, California, that killed four Cambodian children, a 6-year-old Vietnamese child, and wounded 30 in 1989? It was an event that foreshadowed the tragedies at Columbine and Sandy Hook.
By exposing these unspoken truths in writing, Ng memorializes Asians who faced senseless violence and death. Ng further writes and remembers Vincent Chin and Betty Ong.
Language and text immortalize Ng’s family and of the Asian American experience in America. The translations of Cantonese to English and vice versa curate a transitioning to the present moment.
By revealing the truth through language and writing, history is made to remain in the past. When Ng writes the truth, often exposing the truth, she memorializes them. When it came to Ng’s younger brother’s death, then her father, and soon her mother, she recalls and writes about her family history, of where it all began and ended.
This memoir is a safe keep for the truth and for the lies that kept a community safe. It is a memoir for unspoken yet exposed Asian American history in the United States.
As the eldest daughter of a three younger siblings, her duty is to make sure that they are all in line or else the line comes back to haunt her. Young Ng also bears the burden and duty of being a dutiful daughter, a daughter who had helped glue together her family during the highs and during the lows.
Ng is a baa-bai, and “without children of my own, the lineage of the baa-bai eldest daughter — the take charge girl —ends with me” (224). The baa-bai is an overworked child with adult responsibilities who can’t afford to be meek or afraid, but must work in toward their parents’ best interest.
I wonder, by ending as a baa-bai, what is there to do now?
The reader will uncover what there is to seek in the eyes of a confession baby.
