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Overview

"We were a family of three girls. By Chinese standards, that wasn't lucky. In Chinatown, everyone knew our story. Outsiders jerked their chins, looked at us, shook their heads. We heard things."

In this profoundly moving novel, Fae Myenne Ng takes readers into the hidden heart of San Francisco's Chinatown, to the world of one family's honor, their secrets, and the lost bones of a "paper father." Two generations of the Leong family live in an uneasy tension as they try to fathom the source of a brave young girl's sorrow.

Oldest daughter Leila tells the story: of her sister Ona, who has ended her young, conflicted life by jumping from the roof of a ...

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More About This Book

Overview

"We were a family of three girls. By Chinese standards, that wasn't lucky. In Chinatown, everyone knew our story. Outsiders jerked their chins, looked at us, shook their heads. We heard things."

In this profoundly moving novel, Fae Myenne Ng takes readers into the hidden heart of San Francisco's Chinatown, to the world of one family's honor, their secrets, and the lost bones of a "paper father." Two generations of the Leong family live in an uneasy tension as they try to fathom the source of a brave young girl's sorrow.

Oldest daughter Leila tells the story: of her sister Ona, who has ended her young, conflicted life by jumping from the roof of a Chinatown housing project; of her mother Mah, a seamstress in a garment shop run by a "Chinese Elvis"; of Leon, her father, a merchant seaman who ships out frequently; and the family's youngest, Nina, who has escaped to New York by working as a flight attendant. With Ona and Nina gone, it is up to Leila to lay the bones of the family's collective guilt to rest, and find some way to hope again.

Fae Myenne Ng's luminous debut explores what it means to be a stranger in one's own family, a foreigner in one's own neighborhood—and whether it's possible to love a place that may never feel quite like home.

From the recent outpouring of Asian-American literary talent, which has yielded bestselling novels by such writers as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, comes the remarkable debut of a storyteller whose work has appeared in Harper's. Set in San Francisco's Chinatown, Bone chronicles the haunted lives of the Leong family as it explores the myth and mystery that pervade Chinese-American culture.

Editorial Reviews

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Brutal and poignant, dreamy and gritty, specific to its place and resonant in its implication about what it means to be an American.
Publishers Weekly
This remarkable first novel chronicles a believable journey through pain to healing, exposing the emotional scars--the bleeding hearts and aching kinship bones--of its characters as they try to survive. The Leong family, based in San Francisco's Chinatown, includes three daughters: educator/community-relations specialist Leila, the narrator; restaurant hostess Ona, whose troubled life ends tragically in early adulthood; and Nina, who eventually takes off for New York, where she works as a flight attendant. Heading the clan (in an idiosyncratic, maddening fashion) are mother Mah, a seamstress who owns a baby clothing store, and father Leon, a merchant seaman who lives apart from his wife in an SRO-type hotel, keeping his ``Going-Back-to-China Money'' in a brown bag. Ng summons a quiet urgency from simple language, both in her physical descriptions (such as that of the office of the Hoy Sun Ning Yung Benevolent Association) and in her depictions of the characters' seesawing thoughts and feelings as they move between the Chinese- and English-speaking cultures. She ventures outside the Leong household less often than one might wish, but she lucidly renders those secondary characters, notably Leila's beau, Mason Louie, a mechanic who strives to understand and embrace her relatives but also hopes to convince her to establish a separate family with him. Ng reveals his insight into Leila's moodiness thus: ``He says my anger is like flooding--too much gas, killing the engine.'' With such brilliant details, and in the larger picture of how death and life inform one another, this writer makes a stunning debut. Major ad/promo; author tour. (Jan.)
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Library Journal
In sharp contrast to the overdramatized lives of Chinese Americans in Amy Tan's work, Ng's simply written first novel is totally without sensationalism. Yet because her characters are depicted so realistically, the reader cannot but be moved by the hopes, grief, and quarrels of two generations of Chinese Americans in San Francisco's Chinatown. Mah, who has worked hard all her life in garment sweatshops, finally is able to own her baby-clothing store. Her husband, Leon, who used to be a merchant seaman, worked two shifts in ships' laundry rooms to provide for his family. Nevertheless, the family is torn apart after Ona, the middle daughter, jumps from the tallest building in Chinatown. The bones of contention and bones of inheritance come together in great turmoil as Nina, the youngest daughter, leaves Chinatown for New York City and then Leila, the oldest, marries and moves out to the suburbs. Leon, the paper son to old Leung, fails to keep his promise to take Leung's bones back to China. Thus, a family's tragedy is cast in greater historical context, and the reader is rewarded with a rich reading experience. Recommended for all libraries.-- Cherry W. Li, Los Angeles
Michiko Kakutani
An incantatory first novel....[Ms. Ng] is blessed with a poet's gift for metaphor and a reporter's eye for detail. -- The New York Times

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781401309534
  • Publisher: Hyperion
  • Publication date: 5/13/2008
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 208
  • Sales rank: 307,120
  • Product dimensions: 5.10 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 0.70 (d)

Meet the Author

Fae Myenne Ng was born in San Francisco and now lives in New York City. Her short stories have appeared in Harper's and other magazines have been widely anthologized.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One


We were a family of three girls. By Chinese standards, that wasn't lucky. In Chinatown, everyone knew our story. Outsiders jerked their chins, looked at us, shook their heads. We heard things.

"A failed family. That Dulcie Fu. And you know which one: bald Leon. Nothing but daughters."

Leon told us not to care about what people said. "People talking. People jealous." He waved a hand in the air. "Five sons don't make one good daughter."

I'm Leila, the oldest, Mah's first, from before Leon. Ona came next and then Nina. First, Middle, and End Girl. Our order of birth marked us and came to tell more than our given names.

Here's another bone for the gossipmongers. On vacation recently, visiting Nina in New York, I got married. I didn't marry on a whim--don't worry, I didn't do a green-card number. Mason Louie was no stranger. We'd been together four, five years, and it was time.

Leon was the first person I wanted to tell, so I went looking for him in Chinatown. He's not my real father, but he's the one who's been there for me. Like he always told me, it's time that makes a family, not just blood.

Mah and Leon are still married, but after Ona jumped off the Nam, Leon moved out. It was a bad time. Too much happened on Salmon Alley. We don't talk about it. Even the sewing ladies leave it alone. Anyway, it works out better that Mah and Leon don't live in the same place. When they're not feuding about the past, Leon visits Mah, helps her with the Baby Store, so they see enough of each other.

Leon's got a room at that old-man hotel on Clay Street, the San Fran. There's a toilet and bath on each floor andthe lobby's used as a common room. No kitchen. I gave Leon a hot plate but he likes to have his meals either down the block at Uncle's Cafe or over at the Universal Cafe.

Leon's got the same room he had when he was a bachelor going out to sea every forty days. Our Grandpa Leong lived his last days at the San Fran, so it's an important place for us. In this country, the San Fran is our family's oldest place, our beginning place, our new China. The way I see it, Leon's life's kind of made a circle.

In the mornings, Leon likes to sit in the lobby timing the No-55 Sacramento buses, he likes to hassle the drivers if they're not on time. They humor him, call him Big Boss. It was just after eight when I got to the San Fran, but the lobby was empty. There was a thin comb of morning light on the dusty rose-colored sofa, and the straight-back chairs were still pushed up against the wall, at their tidy night angles. When I pulled the accordion doors of the elevator back, they unfolded into a diamond pattern with a loud clang. I yanked the lever back and held it there until the number 8 floated by on the wheel contraption Leon called the odometer; then I jerked the handle forward and the elevator stopped level to the ninth floor. Leon's room was at the end of the corridor, next to the fire escape.

"Leon?" I knocked. "Leon!" I jiggled the doorknob and it turned. Leon forgets the simplest things--like locking the door: another reason it's better he doesn't live with Mah.

Without Leon, the room looked dingier. There was an old-man smell, and junk all over. Leon was a junk inventor. Very weird stuff. An electric sink. Cookie-tin clocks. Clock lamps. An intercom hooked up to a. cash register hooked up to the alarm system. When they lived together, Mah put up with it all: his screws, his odd beginnings of projects scattered all over her kitchen table, on their bedside. But the day after he shipped out on a voyage, she threw everything into the garbage. She called it his lop sop. But that didn't stop Leon, who continued inventing on the long voyages. On the ships, his bunk was his only space, so every invention was compact. Leon made a miniature of everything: fan, radio, rice cooker. And he brought them all home.

Leon was a collector, too. Stacks of takeout containers, a pile of aluminum tins. Plastic bags filled with packs of ketchup and sugar. White cans with red letters, government-issue vegetables: sliced beets, waxy green beans, squash. His nightstand was a red restaurant stool cluttered with towers of Styrofoam cups, stacks of restaurant napkins, and a cup of assorted fast-food straws. Metal hangers dangled from the closet doorknob. On the windowsill were bunches of lotus leaves and coils of dried noodles. There were several tin cans: one held balls of knotted red string, another brimmed with tangles of rubber bands. The third was ashy with incense punks. Beyond these tins, I could see Colt Tower.

When I visited Leon, he'd make me coffee, boiling water in a pan and straining the grounds like an herbal tea, and then he'd show me every project he had in progress: alarm clocks, radios, lamps, and tape recorders. He'd read to me from his newspaper piles: The Chinese Times, The China Daily News, Wah Kue, World News, Ming Bao. Leon snipped and saved the best stories for his private collection: Lost Husbands, Runaway Wives, Ungrateful Children.

Leon kept his private stash of money, what he called his Going-Back-to-China fund, in a brown bag tucked into an old blanket of Ona's. I called it his petty-cash bag. I slipped a red envelope inside.

Bone. Copyright © by Fae M. Ng. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted March 8, 2001

    Brave Effort,A Rewarding Read

    Fae Ng has written a very courageous novel with brilliant insights into the lives of first generation Chinese living here in the U.S. Through her characters, we see the complicated spoken and hidden demands that are made on children by their parents. We witness the quiet destruction that can come about when these demands are too great. Oftentimes, parents do not know the effects of this type of 'love'. There is truth here. We unravel the story like an onion. Time is pealed away to reveal the many sides of 'truth'. We taste the meat, as we make way to the essence or the very'bone' of our core. This book provided me many valuable insights into my own existance. And why I view things and people the way I do. Ms. Ng gave me 'validation' , and for this I will always remain thankful ! If you are Chinese American, run out and buy this book today! Write me and tell me what you thought...........

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 28, 2001

    One of the Best Asian American Novels

    With it's spare, carefully woven narrative and backward-moving structure, Fae Myenne Ng's novel is one of the best-written Asian American novels out there. I also appreciated the novel's focus. Unlike other Asian American fiction that seem intent on satisfying the mainstream audience's thirst for ethnicity as a sort of exotic travelogue, 'Bone' avoids overexplanation, aims for higher goals, focusing instead on the larger human story, of which ethnicity is only a part.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 19, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

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