The Concubine's Children [Anglais] [Broché]

This superbly told saga of family loyalties and disaffections reads more like a novel than an actual chronicle of Chan Sam, a Chinese peasant who left his family in 1913 to seek his fortune in the "Gold Mountain" of western Canada. There, though always planning to return to them, he set up a second family with the beautiful, headstrong concubine he brought with him from China. The story is narrated in the third person by his granddaughter, a Canadian economist, who creates an unsentimental portrait of both families: of Huangbo, the patient "home-wife" who raised their son and the two children the concubine, May-ying, left behind, and survived the Japanese occupation of China and the rule of Mao Tse-tung; of May-ying, whose earnings as a waitress in west coast teahouses often supported the struggling Chan Sam, his family in China and her own two Canadian-born children. And we learn of the fate of all the children, especially May-ying's daughter Hing, the author's mother. Although Chan Sam never fulfilled his dream of returning to his home-family, after his death, Hing and the author made the pilgrimage to China to embrace the relatives they had never known. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Formerly a senior economist for Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Chong also is a writer of essays and articles. The subject of his first book is a true-life family history, beginning in about 1920 and ending in 1980. Its main character is Chong's maternal grandmother, May-ying, described as an unusually beautiful woman who came to Vancouver, Canada, to serve as a concubine. While May-ying's life was determined for her (i.e., to make money to send back to her "husband's" family in China), in the process she became an alcoholic, a gambler, and a prostitute. Her vices had a tremendously negative affect on her relationship with her husband, who eventually divorced her, and her daughter, Chong's mother, who grew up in rooming houses with no one to care for her. Told in a compassionate and forthright manner, this book makes sense out of the lives of many Chinese who came to the West to search for gold. In this respect, it is even better in form and content than the fictionalized works of Amy Tan. Recommended for all collections.
Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Oak Park, Ill.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Her curiosity piqued by a few old photographs, Chong retraced a family history that spanned an ocean and linked two continents. The epic tale she unearthed was that of her grandmother's life. Sold as a concubine to a Chinese man trying to make his fortune in the New World, May-ying became the fellow's second wife, working the tea house circuit in the greasy Chinatowns of Canada's west coast to support her husband's first wife and family back in South China. After an extended return to China, May-ying left two of her daughters with the first wife, never to see them again, and returned to Canada to give birth to her third child. The stories of a family on two continents that Chong subsequently tells reflect the impacts of such historical events as World War II, the reign of Mao Zedong, and changes in China's immigration policies. Carefully balancing cool observation and compassion, Chong writes extraordinary history and gives voice to the Chinese immigrant experience as China made its dramatic twentieth-century reentry upon the world stage. Mary Ellen Sullivan --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

In her first book, Chong reconstructs the story of her mother's Chinese and Chinese-Canadian family, skillfully mixing social history with family biography. Using letters, public archives, interviews, and her mother's own memories, Chong creates a history rich in physical detail and emotional nuance. She begins in 1924, in Canton, when her grandmother, May-ying, a 17-year-old servant, was sold into concubinage to Chan Sam, a Chinese laborer in Vancouver. Chan Sam (Chong's grandfather) already had a wife back in Kwangtung, but he was lonely living abroad. To pay off the cost of May-ying's passage to Canada, Chan Sam indentured her to two years of work as a waitress in a teahouse in Vancouver's Chinatown. Though at first this was a sharp indignity to May-ying (waitresses were regarded as little better than prostitutes), it taught her a skill, and throughout her life she was able to find work, which Chan Sam often could not. This economic independence gave her a measure of control over, and eventually a way out of, her unhappy concubinage. Chong takes us through the couple's brief stay in China and return to Vancouver; May-ying's separation from her two oldest daughters, Nan and Ping, who were left with Chan Sam's first wife to be educated in China; the estrangement of Chan Sam and May-ying; youngest daughter Hing's often-neglected girlhood with May-ying; and the eventual reunion of Hing and Ping in China. Chong provides clear historical context. We understand Hing's painful childhood in terms of Chinese culture's ancient contempt for girl children; a seer had predicted that Hing would be a boy, and her mother was always openly disappointed. Despite her meticulous historicism, though, Chong is always attuned to the complexities of individuals, never wholly reducing anything to politics or economics. An eloquent, unsentimental act of love, prompted by the writer's contagious desire to make sense of her origins. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Chong's story of a family's changes relates the experiences of a Chinese grandmother brought to New York as a concubine who left family behind in the Old World while starting a new life in the Chinatowns of America. Letters, photos and memories resurrected by her descendants reconstructed the very different lives of two families living on two sides of the world, uniting a divided family. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Chong tells the story of her grandmother, brought from China as a young concubine by a sojourner to the New World, of the man's wife and children left behind, and of the author's incredible discovery of those children six decades later. "Beautiful, haunting, and wise."--New York Times Book Review. Photos.