Disappearing Moon Cafe (Landmark Edition) - Softcover

Lee, Sky

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1926455819 ISBN 13: 9781926455815

Publisher: NeWest Press, 2017

Synopsis

Disappearing Moon Cafe was a stunning debut novel that has become a Canadian literary classic. An unflinchingly honest portrait of a Chinese Canadian family that pulses with life and moral tensions, this family saga takes the reader from the wilderness in nineteenth-century British Columbia to late twentieth-century Hong Kong, to Vancouver's Chinatown.

Intricate and lyrical, suspenseful and emotionally rich, it is a riveting story of four generations of women whose lives are haunted by the secrets and lies of their ancestors but also by the racial divides and discrimination that shaped the lives of the first generation of Chinese immigrants to Canada.

Each character, intimately drawn through Lee's richness of imagery and language, must navigate a world that remains inexorably "double" Chinese and Canadian. About buried bones and secrets, unrequited desires and misbegotten love, murder and scandal, failure and success, the plot reveals a compelling microcosm of the history of race and gender relations in this country.

About this title

About the Author

SKY Lee grew up in Port Albermi, BC. In the late 1960s, she was a founder of the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop. Her debut novel, Disappearing Moon Cafe, was nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award and won the City of Vancouver Book Award. SKY Lee currently resides in Toronto.

From Kirkus Reviews

A compelling first novel by the Canadian Lee that tries to do for Asian-Canadian women what Amy Tan and Maxine Hong-Kingston have done for their Asian-American counterparts: give mythical shape to the experiences of immigration, assimilation, and struggle for identity in the West. Kae Ying Woo narrates this tapestry-like story, which traces three generations of the Asian-Canadian Wong family. The book opens with a recollection of the settler experiences of Kelora Chen, a half-native/half-Chinese, and the Wong family patriarch, Wong Gwei Chang, who in 1892 left China to find his fortune in North America. Kelora's heroic act of saving Wong's life symbolizes almost too obviously the great strength and struggle of the women who follow in their family line. Their lives revolve around the Disappearing Moon Cafe, the largest restaurant in Vancouver's Chinatown, operated by the overbearing matriarch Lee Mui Lan. Within her domain are Fong Mei, Lee's abused daughter-in-law, who is tormented for not rendering children to Lee's son; Seto Chi, Malaysian born, sold out of her family at birth because of the superstition that girl babies are bad luck; Beatrice, Kae's own mother, who breaks Chinese tradition by marrying a man of whom her family disapproves. Lee's theme is that these women endured a double discrimination--on the one hand, from the ``white-devils'' of the West, who limited their immigration and restricted their work choices, and, on the other, from patriarchal Chinese customs. The obvious feminist message fortunately includes large doses of wit and humor. Lee successfully combines magic realism and epic sweep in the fast-moving story, which should inspire mainly fans of the increasingly popular literature of Asian-American writers. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: NeWest Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1926455819
• ISBN 13: 9781926455815
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352