Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
In A Long Stay in a Distant Land, readers meet the immigrant Lum family, natives of Hong Kong with a curious proclivity for meeting untimely deaths in uniquely American fashion. Since the 1940s, when newly arrived Grandpa Melvin, inspired by his hero Popeye, joined the U.S. Army to fight the Nazis, Lum descendants have fallen victim to a series of deadly incidents involving such icons of Americana as an ice cream truck and a cheeseburger.
The story's narrator is 20-something Louis Lum, whose desire is to lead a quiet, independent life away from his father, Sonny, an unlikely gangsta rap devotee who hears in the angry music the voice of the immigrant dispossessed. Instead, in the wake of his mother's death in a car accident, Louis is compelled to move back home. Having managed, at least in part, to quell Sonny's murderous desires, Louis departs for Hong Kong in search of his long-lost uncle, whose self-imposed exile both infuriates and perplexes Louis's dictatorial grandmother. As Louis arrives in his ancestral land, he achieves a deeper understanding of the familial and cultural forces that shaped his own colorful, utterly diverting, and idiosyncratic kin.
Exhibiting a rare talent in a debut novel, Chieng pinpoints -- with devastating precision and absolute clarity -- the tragicomedy of the absurd that likely permeates much of the immigrant experience in any culture. (Summer 2005 Selection)
A Long Stay in a Distant Land: A Novel
Narrated by James Yaegashi
Chieh ChiengUnabridged — 6 hours, 42 minutes
A Long Stay in a Distant Land: A Novel
Narrated by James Yaegashi
Chieh ChiengUnabridged — 6 hours, 42 minutes
Audiobook (Digital)
Related collections and offers
Overview
In this funny and inventive novel, the Lums are a death-stalked Chinese American family living in Orange County, California. Ever since Grandpa Melvin was inspired to join the US Army after watching a Popeye movie and-as family lore has it-unleashed a “relentless rain of steel death” upon the Nazis, Lum after Lum has been doomed to an untimely demise, be it by tainted cheeseburger or speeding ice-cream truck. Now young Louis must move back home with his father, Sonny, to prevent him from enacting the revenge he promises. But soon Louis finds himself searching for his long-lost uncle Bo Lum in Hong Kong. As Louis' search progresses, the tragicomic story of three generations of Lums in America is revealed through the eyes of Louis, Sonny, and Grandma Esther.
Editorial Reviews
William Maxwell' rises splendidly to the occasion of his best novels and stories.
— The New York Times
Through this glancing, time-traveling series of anecdotes, Chieng follows the entire Lum clan over the last 60 years. It's a neat trick, a weightless way of handling that weightiest of subjects, ancestry. Generational sagas often read like a dreary litany: Granny suffered, Mom suffered, I suffered. On the flip side, novels celebrating family can be mawkish and one-note and overfull of adorable eccentrics. With his quiet humor and spare style, Chieng gets very close to reality, where your extended family is neither good nor bad, just one of life's immovable objects.
— The New York Times
Chieng chronicles three generations of the comically ill-fated Chinese-American Lum family in his whimsical debut. Ever since Grandpa Melvin defied family wishes by enlisting during WWII, the Lums have been cursed by untimely deaths. Living in suburban Orange County, Calif., certainly doesn't protect them from wayward ice cream trucks and E. coli-laced burgers. So when the certified hermit of the family, Uncle Bo-who escaped the suffocating grip of his mother's love by moving to Hong Kong-stops returning her regular form letters, which ask questions like "Do you always plan on waking up the next day?" Grandma Esther suspects the worst. Grandson Louis decides to take a much-needed sabbatical from his father, Sonny-who comforts himself with rap music while calling for revenge on the overtired medical student who crashed into his wife's car and killed her-by traveling to Hong Kong to look for his uncle. Though Uncle Bo's plight remains central, the novel adheres to no strict narrative structure; it dips in and out of the Lum family over the course of half a century, treating readers to delectable nibbles of zany family lore and conjectural genealogies stretching back centuries. Charmingly eccentric and refreshingly unstereotypical, the novel still suffers a bit from its dibs and dabs construction, which can make the story feel too slick to be satisfying. Agent, Dorian Karchmar. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
This apparent autobiographical novel by Chieng, who was born in Hong Kong and moved to California at age seven, is at once charming, bittersweet, and hilarious. The Lum family seem to be cursed to die young after Grandpa Melvin impulsively joins the U.S. Army to fight the Nazis, against the entire family's objections. We follow several of the Lums, witnessing changes as each generation seems more Americanized. The boys join the Boy Scouts, become spelling bee champions, and enjoy jazz, while their father, Melvin, loves rap music and can state vital statistics about many rappers! The story, which moves back and forth in time, reveals many universal truths and is easy to follow and enjoyable, despite the death toll. Narrator James Yaegashi brilliantly captures each somewhat eccentric character, with elderly women being his best creations; he also excels at comic understatement. Large ethnic and particularly Chinese community libraries should add this outstanding work.-Susan G. Baird, Chicago Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Gr 4-6-Virginia Hamilton's semiautobiographical novel (Blue Sky Press, 2002) quietly shows how the stories of the past and present complete the picture of a family. Living in rural Ohio, just as Hamilton did, 11-year-old Valena deals with racism, surviving a tornado, and the loss of a pet but also experiences the joys of her first circus and seeing the aurora borealis. As we learn about Valena's summer adventures and experiences, her mother weaves in her family's history of slavery and other stories. Tales of Great-Grandpa Luke and the Underground Railroad intertwine with the legend of a pygmy brought from Africa on a slave ship to create the real strength of the book. Actress Lisa Renee Pitts uses her buttery smooth voice to bring all of Hamilton's characters to life. Listeners are transported back in time with musical interludes that pace the story and are historically pertinent.-April Mazza, Wayland Public Library, MA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Tired of overstuffed family sagas? How about a family saga lite? That's what Chieng, spoofing the genre, offers in his debut. Tongue-in-cheek, Chieng starts with a family tree, dated 2002, of the Lums, a Chinese-American clan in California. This is a tree with many fallen limbs. Our quasi-protagonist, 23 year-old Louis, lists six dead Lums in his lifetime-ah, those freak accidents! The latest death is that of his mother, in a head-on collision, and father Sonny is hell-bent on a revenge killing of the other driver, an exhausted hospital resident asleep at the wheel. It's Louis's mission to stop his father's project; his other mission is to ease his grandmother Esther's anxiety by tracking down his reclusive Uncle Bo. With these two frail storylines, Chieng, skipping around chronologically, passes over key moments of the standard immigrant saga: the Lums' arrival in the US, say, or their later move from San Francisco's Chinatown to the white suburbs of Orange County. He does show the racial consciousness of the Lums after Pearl Harbor, when the family tries but fails to dissuade Louis's stubborn grandfather Melvin from enlisting in the white man's war. But by 2002, the Lums are completely assimilated. They speak with a sitcom snap, Louis worships at Wal-Mart and Target, Sonny is crazy for rap music. Skewering racial stereotyping, Chieng makes Hersey Collins, that sleepy hospital resident, a black man unacquainted with rap music. The avenging Sonny lets him off the hook when Hersey accepts a rap record in a denouement a little too cute. As for Uncle Bo, he'd found his family overwhelming and escaped to Hong Kong. His mother still adores him, but unconditional love can be crushing: that'sthe lesson Bo has for Louis when uncle and nephew finally meet. Chieng's deadpan playfulness works for and against him: it draws the reader in at first, but then its brittleness gets in the way of full identification with his characters. Still, on the whole, a promising debut. Agent: Dorian Karchmar/Lowenstein-Yost Associates
"Chieng's take on life is humor in its most visceral form: informed by suffering and loss, at once side-splitting and sincere."
"Chieng creates just enough suspense to keep the story moving along, but not too much to prevent his audience from savoring its humor."
"Chieng [has a] wonderful ear."
"[Chieh is] a fresh comic voice…a touching and auspicious debut."
"Chieh Chieng has clear sight and a distinctive voice, a devastating dead-pan wit animated by a lively sense of what is absurd."
Count your blessings--you could be a Lum, the death-stalked family of this intriguing novel. Lums don't die in conventional ways either. Their ends come at the hands of ice cream trucks, cheeseburgers, and Nazis. Narrator James Yaegashi lovingly renders this story in an understated tone that fits the novel. His methodical pace and easy style nudge the action along and keep the book interesting. His deep voice is soothing and cool, and he makes dialogue sound as though it comes from real people. He runs into trouble only while trying to evoke convincing female characters. Unfortunately, he misses the mark, with one of the elderly females sounding like Marge Simpson. This is a minor issue though. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169862119 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 06/27/2005 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
A LONG STAY IN A DISTANT LAND
A NOVELBy CHIEH CHIENG
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2005 Chieh ChiengAll right reserved.
ISBN: 1-58234-533-3
Chapter One
Speaking Japanese Badly (2002)
Louis Lum's father began calling him. He called early in the morning and late at night to say he wanted to run down Hersey Collins with his car, or crush his skull with a brick. His father never called him at work to discuss such matters, and for that measure of decorum Louis was grateful.
"Doesn't sound like a good idea," Louis would say. "Have you been riding your exercise bike?"
Day after day his father's desire remained unchanged. The old man wanted to end Hersey Collins, who five months before had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed head-on into Louis's mother's car on a narrow stretch of Springdale Street.
"Man shouldn't have been driving," his father said. "Had no business being on the road."
Louis suggested they go to church. "It'll get you out of the house."
"I'll have to wake up Sunday morning."
"You don't sleep anyway. You'll get to be around people." The last time he had attended Golden Harvest Baptist was five years ago, and Louis wanted to return with his father now because he remembered how mellow everyone was at church. His mother had been a longstanding member of the congregation. She'd laughed and poducked with her fellow Baptists, none of whom everexpressed a desire to crack someone's neck with a hammer.
Louis hoped church would calm his father and convince him that physical violence was not the right course of action.
The old man continued calling to say, "I can't believe he's still free on the streets. I want to kill him."
Louis stopped picking up the phone. He let his machine answer his father's threats and then called back to say, "Got your message. Don't do it. Let's go to church."
His father eventually agreed to go and Louis picked him up the following Sunday. They didn't talk on the drive over.
The church was a converted barbershop located at the end of a cul-de-sac in Anaheim. The neighboring buildings housed machine and sewing shops; anyone who didn't have business on this street would have no reason to be here.
They arrived ten minutes late and sat on steel folding chairs near the back exit. In front of them were three rows of chairs facing an old wooden lectern, behind which Pastor Elkin stood. He said, "Don't be shy," and motioned for Louis and his father to come forward and sit with the rest of the congregation. Before Louis could respond, his father said, "Thanks, but we're good here."
Pastor Elkin spoke into a microphone and his voice echoed through two overhead speakers, one of which hung directly above Louis and delivered the sermon with a thumping bass.
The cement floor was flecked with sawdust left over from the parties held by the German Association of Orange County and Boy Scout Troops 145 and 167. During the week, retired Germans clinked steins and chatted here, and boys drank milk and ate brownies while music played through the speakers.
Louis's father shifted continuously throughout the hour-long service, stretching his legs, pulling them back, the steel joints of the chair whining under his weight. During the closing question-and-answer session that followed the doxology and benediction, his father stood and asked over the mostly gray heads of the twenty-five congregation members:
"If someone beat up your brother, wouldn't you feel obligated to beat him up? I've beaten up people on account of my brother. Yeah, we were kids at the time.
"If someone stole a hundred dollars from you and you had a chance to see him again, you wouldn't feel tempted to punch him? What about a slap? Because he did you wrong.
"If someone slaps you, you wouldn't slap him back? It stings, you know, to be slapped. Come on, you know you'd do it."
Each response that came back from Pastor Elkin was an unequivocal no.
No from the pastor. No from the congregation members.
No I wouldn't slap bim back.
Louis fidgeted in his seat while his father posed so many variations of the same question that Pastor Elkin eventually asked, "Something you want to talk about, Sonny?"
"No," his father said, "nothing at all."
Louis's mother had brought him to church because she'd wanted him to accept Jesus into his heart. She'd said it was required for getting into Heaven. "It's like getting a passport, and once you get it you don't have to worry about going to Hell."
"If I get my passport, why do I have to keep going to church?" Louis had asked.
"Because I'm not giving you a choice."
He'd been the only child attending services filled with people in their forties and fifties. "A handsome boy," they'd say. "So smart."
"Not so bright," his mother would respond. "Terrible in geography. Doesn't know Cameroon from Ghana." Once she'd said, "Looks too much like his grandfather. His paternal grand- father."
"Why do you tell them I'm creepy looking?" he'd asked on the drive home.
"I was being humble for you," his mother said, her eyes fixed on the road.
"If they want to say I'm handsome, why do you have to say I look creepy?"
"You don't look creepy. People will like you more if you don't accept their praise. If you tell them you're slow-witted and clumsy, they'll think you're the opposite."
"They'll think I'm slow-witted and clumsy."
"It's called humility."
Louis believed church had been like a party for his mother and she hadn't wanted to attend alone. She'd press his Sunday suit Saturday night and slick his hair with gel Sunday morning.
His father should have been the one to sacrifice his Sunday mornings to accompany her, but she said, "He decided long ago he'd be happy in Hell. You know what he said? He said, 'I'd go straight to Hell in exchange for sleeping in Sundays for the rest of my life. Do you have any idea how tired I am by the time I get to Sunday?'
"I said, 'Hey buddy, you're not the only one who works fifty-plus hours a week. You don't have to stay up nights prepping for lectures. You don't have to grade exams on your weekends.'
"He told me to stop nagging him, and I was only trying to do him a favor."
When, as a child, Louis asked his father to go to church, he answered, "Why should I?" and his mother said, "Don't nag him. He wants to go to Hell."
Louis had asked his father to go so he himself could sleep in. More important, he hadn't wanted his father to go to Hell.
He first heard Pastor Elkin's sermon on damnation when he was seven. Pastor Elkin had described the Underworld as a place where eternal flames melted the skin off your body, on which baseball-sized boils swelled and exploded, jetting out thick streams of greasy black pus onto the black streets, where packs of the wild dead-with their eternally melting skin and continuously erupting boils-hunted down and vomited on each other.
"Now don't you want Jesus to come into your heart?" his mother asked on the drive home.
That night he prayed, "Jesus, please come into my heart." He made the same request every night for six months, and asked Pastor Elkin if there was a limit to how many times he could do it. "I'm sure once is enough," Pastor Elkin said. Louis didn't believe him and continued inviting Jesus until the end of the year.
Jesus, he believed, was someone who looked like Max von Sydow, who handed out fish and bread to new arrivals, and who said, "See, I told you so," as they passed through what Pastor Elkin had described as gates laden with pearls and silver.
The day after high school graduation, Louis announced he was finished with church. "I invited Jesus into my heart three hundred and twenty-four times," he told his mother. "I'm going to Heaven." Saturday had been his only day to sleep in and he wanted his Sunday mornings back.
"You're eighteen and I can't force you to keep going," she said. She was upset and disappointed and he felt bad for her. However, the next Sunday he slept in until noon and woke up to one of the most refreshing and happy Sundays he'd ever had.
In the five years since he'd last attended Golden Harvest with her, no one new had joined the congregation, which now consisted of the same twenty-five people week in and week out.
The youngest members looked at least fifty. Many looked sixty and over. Louis felt like he was watching a species in its final years, the last clan of Atlantic seabirds being killed off by hunters, oil spills, or simply time, until there was not one left and no evidence they'd ever existed.
There were never curious visitors who happened to drop in. There were no children and no one who seemed capable of a short sprint, or even a light jog around the block. Hairs were gray and silver, skin was cracked, and life was always a burst blood vessel away from ending.
At the end of each service, Pastor Elkin would say, "Let us continue trying to bring in new sheep," and the congregation would say, "Amen."
A month into their churchgoing, Louis's father ran into congregation member Arnold Mannion at an Albertson's and asked him a question.
Arnold said there was no way he'd ever slap somebody back.
"You're not being honest," Louis's father said.
"You can slap me if you want."
"Are you serious?"
"Please," Arnold said.
"He told me to," Louis's father said on the drive to Golden Harvest the following Sunday. "He put his groceries down and waited for me to do it."
"What happened?" Louis asked.
"I slapped him."
"Hard?"
"There was a loud pop. His faced turned pink. I didn't hit him that hard. He has delicate skin."
"Wasn't he mad?"
"No. He hugged me. He said, 'Good, get your grief out.' Then he smiled." Louis's father looked puzzled. "What kind of a person asks to get slapped and smiles after?"
Louis shrugged and kept his eyes on the road ahead.
The church members often related personal testimonies that involved the importance of forgiveness. At each service, some- one stood in front of the congregation and told a story about how he'd invited for dinner a coworker who'd "borrowed" his soda from the company fridge, or how he'd brought apple fritters to a neighbor whose dogs crapped on his front lawn.
That morning, Arnold stood and delivered his testimony. "Sonny Lum slapped me last week. I was happy to help him vent his frustration."
Pastor Elkin nodded.
Louis's father stood from his seat in the back and shouted, "He asked me to do it! It was consensual!"
"That's right," Arnold said, and cries of "Sweet Jesus!" and "Yes Lord!" echoed through the room.
"Nobody's blaming you," Pastor Elkin told Louis's father. "Arnold wanted to help you. He asked you to vent your frustration because he hoped it would make you feel better."
"He can slap me back," Louis's father said. "He has the right. Come on, Arnold, you know you want to."
Louis pulled his father back down.
"What kind of a church is this?" his father asked on the drive home. He was disappointed to learn that Golden Harvest would not deviate from the forgiveness of the New Testament, the turning-the-other-cheek rule. It would forever consider eye-for-an-eye an invalid and unjustifiable formula for present-day life, and because of this Louis's father decided to stop attending. The next Sunday Louis slept well past noon.
Louis was making a living as an editorial assistant at a hot rod magazine based in Mission Viejo, and the salary afforded rent for a studio apartment in Santa Ana, utilities, car insurance, gas, and food, with twenty dollars left over each month.
Two years ago, he'd graduated from college and taken the job mostly because it was all he could get and partly to annoy his mother.
"Nineteen a year?" she'd asked. "You have a college degree." She'd believed having a B.A. meant working for no less than thirty a year. "This is insulting," she'd said.
He hadn't felt insulted, but her resistance to his job had heightened his enjoyment of it. He found satisfaction in doing or saying things she didn't want him to do or say. He would never have taken a job to rile anyone else, though now that she was dead, he felt he should have found something with a higher salary and a more respectable title. He could use the extra money. He could use a vacation. A quiet room in a distant land. A long stay to forget about Hersey, the accident, and his father's rage. He wanted to sleep on foreign soil, somewhere where nobody knew him and he knew nobody-Auckland, Toronto, Yonkers.
He was a fact checker and he did his job well. The copy chief handed him so many EA of the Month awards that he was eventually declared the permanent EA of the Month. His picture hung on the wall in the front lobby under a giant portrait of Percy, the Chihuahua that belonged to the publisher's wife. In addition, he was assigned a leather reclining chair with oak armrests. It was the most luxurious chair ever given to an EA. All the others had standard-issue rollers with synthetic fabric and poor back support.
Louis's mother had lived by the code "Whatever you do, do it better than everyone else who's doing it, or find something else to do." A week before the accident, they'd spoken on the phone and he'd told her about his chair.
"It's the best chair for someone in your position?" she'd asked.
"Yes."
"Leather, you said?"
"Yes."
"Better than nothing."
Two weeks after quitting Golden Harvest, Louis's father called and said, "I'm driving to his house. I have a knife. I'm going to stab him in the heart." It was one in the morning, and the old man wasn't being rude by calling because neither of them went to bed before two or three.
"You sure you want to do this?" Louis asked.
"Yes." "Really?" "Yes." "You really going to his house?" "No. But I plan to." "You're home?" "Yes." "I'll come over." "I'm really thinking about going there. I can do it."
"I know. Stay right there."
Hersey Collins was a twenty-seven-year-old first-year resident at UCI Medical driving home after a forty-eight-hour shift when he nodded out. The wheel had slipped from his fingers and turned his car directly into her path. The total strength of impact had equaled their velocities combined, eight thousand pounds of steel and glass crashing at one hundred miles an hour. He'd been lucky. He'd been driving the much bigger car, a gray Land Cruiser that'd crushed her Camry. The paramedics had found her body in the backseat, along with the steering wheel and most of the dash.
Louis arrived at his father's house and found him sitting on the driveway, wearing a white T-shirt, gray sweats, and sandals.
"I have to do something to him." His father stood and walked back into the house. Louis followed. "You retiled the hallway."
"Took a few weeks," his father said.
"It looks nice." Louis walked into the living room. "You repainted the walls."
"Yeah."
The carpet had been replaced by dark brown hardwood.
"I shouldn't have called," his father said. "You can go home."
"You can't just call, tell me what you told me, and tell me to go home."
"I'm fine."
Louis was angry at Hersey's carelessness, but he had no desire to kill the man. What Hersey shouldn't have done was wait for Louis's father at the hospital, offer his apologies, address, and number, and say, "If there's anything I can do for you, I'll do it." He should have gone home.
"Sorry I woke you," Louis's father said.
"Say, 'I won't kill Hersey Collins.'"
His father said nothing.
"You never said you were driving to his house before," Louis said.
"I was trying to work myself up."
"Is my bed still here?"
"Yes."
"I'll sleep here tonight."
They got up for work the next morning, and Louis came back at four sharp to make sure his father returned soon after. They watched TV that evening, and repeated this pattern of work and TV until the end of the week, when he asked his father, "Do you still want to kill him?"
"Yes."
Another week passed.
Each time Louis asked the question, his father said, "Yes."
"If you say you won't drive to his house, even if you want to, I'll leave," Louis said. "I'll go back to my place."
"I don't want to lie."
"Don't you want this house back to yourself?"
His father didn't answer.
"Why do you want to do it? What good would it do?"
"It's like he cut off my right leg," his father said. "And now I'm hobbling around and he's walking fine with two good legs."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A LONG STAY IN A DISTANT LAND by CHIEH CHIENG Copyright © 2005 by Chieh Chieng. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Videos
