• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2023 April #1
  *Starred Review* Each of Ng's exquisite books, Bone (1993), Steer toward Rock (2008), now this, is worth the 15-year wait in-between. After two novels (although her sister has said about her fiction, "‘I know where you got everything'"), Ng presents a luminous memoir, finding transformative, aching authenticity in revealing difficult lives. In 1940, Ng's father was one of the infamous Angel Island's final detainees. To circumvent the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which engendered generations of Chinese American "orphan bachelors," Ng's Big Aunt paid $4,000 (today's equivalent, $82,000) for Ng's father to become the paper son of a U.S. citizen. He lost that paper citizenship in 1966 when he entered the Chinese Confession Program; he was legally naturalized in 2001. Exclusion and confession profoundly defined Ng's and her family's identity. As the firstborn to her sailor father and seamstress mother, Ng bore the brunt of responsibility for three younger siblings. Home life was complicated. Deh left for long stretches, leaving Mah overworked, their relationship acrimonious. Ng escaped San Francisco for New York City, but death (of baby brother, father, mother) eventually called her home. Ng pithily encapsulates the decades: "On Being a Confession Baby, Chinatown Daughter, Baa-Bai Sister, Caretaker of Exotics, Literary Balloon Peddler, and Grand Historian of a Doomed American Family." Her exceptional storytelling elucidates and illuminates. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.

FAE MYENNE NG is the author of bestseller and PEN/Faulkner Fiction finalist Bone and American Book Award winner Steer Toward Rock. Her work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and anthologized in Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, Literature Across Cultures, The PEN Short Fiction Project, and The Pushcart Prize. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Guggenheim, the Lannan Foundation, the NEA, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She teaches creative writing and literature in UC Berkeley’s Department of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies.