Ma in All Caps

MA IN ALL CAPS book is a laugh-out-loud hilarious “ma-moir” about an irrepressible woman known to the world as “Ma.” Epic and sweeping in its storytelling, but as intimate as a son’s love for his ailing mother, it’s David Sedaris meets Amy Tan in a family saga with an unforgettable tiger mom holding center stage.

Ma is the opinionated matriarch of the Chinese Kuo clan, the scion of a once wealthy and powerful Chinese family that lost everything during two devastating wars and has been struggling since to regain its former glory. Ma brings you into the Kuo family through her unfiltered storytelling spanning five generations, three centuries, and two continents, leaving you amazed by her wit and bluntness while charming you with her inimitable way of looking at and judging the world.


From the author:

Family memoirs are fraught. Tell the truth, warts and all, and your own family members might resent you. Get the facts wrong, and you’ll spark family dinner arguments for years.

MA IN ALL CAPS is just such an ambitious undertaking. The project began after I’d collected up hundreds of verbatim conversations between me and Ma, which I dutifully recorded and immediately posted on social media, to the delight of my friends. The most frequent feedback I received was, “These are hilarious. You need to write a book with them all in it.”

Of course, I knew that Ma was far more than the unintentionally funny, ever judgmental, and chronically pushy Chinese mother archetype that our many digitally published conversations. She was someone who’d lived many lives in one, from bitter days of deprivation, facing war as a child, to golden years of promise, love and family as a mother and grandmother. She often did all of this with little to no support from anyone else. She made her way through, and she left her indelible mark.

MA IN ALL CAPS is a collection of her near fantastical but amazingly true stories, which really are the tales of two nations, China and the U.S., as they came into their own just as Ma did. Because it’s a memory piece, I don’t know if I can faithfully call it “non-fiction,” because who knows what tricks memory worn by time will play.

What emerges from this telling is a complex heroine: the eldest daughter of an ambitious couple tied to the political class in China, a girl raised surprisingly as a Catholic by her devout mother, who manages to blend Chinese tradition with Christian priggishness. It’s not always a winning combination, but it produces character if Ma is any example.

Readers have told me that, while they expected Ma to bring her characteristic humor, they didn’t expect the stories to be so gripping, the stakes so high. War, death and love can do that. Nor did they expect to learn so much about pre-communist China and the politics of the era, as the defeated Nationalists fled to Taiwan to plot their return one day. The echoes of that conflict still raise blood pressures today.

I wrote this book with future generations of Kuos in mind, so that they can learn about the indefatigable Ma, a force of nature that defined our family. She and Ba put stakes in the ground here in the U.S., which was a foreign land that became their home and ours. I hope that through laughter and a few lumps in the throat, Ma’s spirit will grace readers and live on in their memories, long after they have turned the final page.

Jay Kuo