★ 04/12/2021
Fung’s moving debut follows an unnamed protagonist whose family immigrated to Vancouver from Hong Kong when she was three, right before the 1997 handover to Chinese rule. Her father, fearing he won’t be able to find a job abroad, stays in Hong Kong—and thus, their “astronaut family,” coined by the Hong Kong media to describe families where the father stays behind for work, is born. The narrator grows up in Vancouver with her mother, grandparents and younger sister, born a year after they immigrated, and develops a complicated relationship with her father, whom she only sees twice a year. The time they do spend together, like when she lives with him during a summer internship in Hong Kong or when he visits her during her semester abroad in Hangzhou, China, is marred by criticism, arguments, and hurt feelings. But when her father develops liver disease, the narrator is suddenly faced with the reality that she and her father may never have the opportunity to fill in the gaps of their relationship. Woven throughout are stories from the narrator’s mother and grandmother, whose tales about their family provide both historical context and levity. The bracing fragments and poignant vignettes come together to make a stunning and evocative whole. Agent: Julia Masnick, Watkins Loomis Agency. (June)
This is the book I’m excited about. . . . It’s about grief but it’s . . . light as a feather, and it has to do with how it’s arranged on the page. It’s almost like reading poetry but it’s a novel. . . . The words are beautiful, the writing is gorgeous, but just the way the book is laid out feels extremely refreshing.”—Ann Patchett
“Ghost Forest is a debut certain to turn your heart. With a dexterity and style all her own, Pik-Shuen Fung renders the many voices that make up a family, as well as the mythologies we create for those we know, and those we wish we knew better. I am madly in love with this book, a kaleidoscopic wonder.”—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
“Here, silences speak. Brilliant and pitiless at first, Ghost Forest mutates in the reader’s hand, until it shimmers with grace and unexpected humor. A mercurial meditation on love and family.”—Padma Viswanathan, bestselling author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
“Made by an artist who angles her mirror to make room for the faces of others, Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest resembles a xieyi painting, a place where white space and absence are as important as color and life. Inventive, funny, and devastating.”—Jennifer Tseng, award-winning author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
“Like a Chinese ink painting, every line in Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest is full of movement and spirit, revealing the resilient threads of matrilineal history and the inheritance of stories and silences. With humor, compassion, and clear-eyed prose, Fung reminds us that grief, memory, and history are never linear but always alive.”—K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary
“This is a book to break your heart and then fill it to bursting again. What an exquisite, glorious debut.”—Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse
“Fung’s commitment to this multifaceted take on grief shines through in the moments of lightheartedness and joy that rub shoulders with the novel’s heavier themes.”—Ayoung Kim interviews Pik-Shuen Fung for Cold Tea Collective
“[A] moving debut . . . Bracing fragments and poignant vignettes come together to make a stunning and evocative whole.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Seemingly spare yet undeniably dense with so much unsaid, Fung’s polyphonic first novel is a magnificent literary triumph.”—Booklist (starred review)
★ 07/01/2021
DEBUT Canadian author Fung's debut novel tells the story of a nameless Chinese family that emigrates from Hong Kong to Canada prior to the territory's 1997 handover to China. The narrator describes growing up with her mother, grandmother, and younger sister and living out the well-worn role of academically proficient good Chinese daughter while confronting her strained relationship with her father, who remained in Hong Kong to support the family. (She sees him only twice a year.) Later, she struggles to bond with her father during a summer internship in Hong Kong and a brief study of Chinese ink painting, but the story truly intensifies when her father is diagnosed with severe liver disease. The consequences make this novel much more than a simple telling of one family's story of immigration and assimilation, with the multigenerational perspectives provided by the narrator's mother and grandmother enlivening the text and helping the narrator better understand her life. VERDICT Reminiscent of Amy Tan's early work but more sparely written, this fluid and deeply touching novel—sprinkled throughout with Chinese onomatopoeia and proverbs—will be appreciated by readers drawn to stories of families, relationships, and identity.—Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
2021-03-17
Spurred by her father’s illness, a Chinese Canadian woman explores her family’s past.
When the unnamed narrator is 3, her family immigrates to Vancouver—she, her mother, and her grandparents. Everyone, that is, except her father, who helps them settle in but then returns to Hong Kong, worried that he won’t be able to find a job to support them in a new country. They become an “astronaut family”: “It’s a term invented by the Hong Kong mass media. A family with an astronaut father—flying here, flying there.” In very short, matter-of-fact fragments, the narrator accumulates memories of growing up, adjusting to life in Canada, and handling an often difficult relationship with a father she sees only twice a year. These memories mingle with those of her mother and grandmother, which the narrator begins collecting after her father falls ill from liver disease and the family assembles in Hong Kong. Her mother recalls high school basketball triumphs and, later, the process of caring for the narrator’s younger sister, born with a blood tumor; her grandmother relates, with impish humor, a childhood spent reading classical Chinese novels by night amid war (“Sometimes we couldn’t turn the lights on after sunset or we would get bombed”) and the one time she happened to write an opera. At one point in this nonlinear book, the narrator studies abroad in China during college and learns a spare technique of Chinese ink painting called xieyi. “They left large areas of the paper blank because they felt empty space was as important as form, that absence was as important as presence,” she tells us. “So what did they seek to capture instead? The artist’s spirit.” Debut author Fung seems to be describing her own narrative technique as much as this historical style, and its spareness does occasionally lend the narrative a fittingly agile sense of itinerancy. Largely, though, the details come across as somewhat mundane: They never really cohere into something bigger than their sum, and the characters remain unconvincing collections of attributes. As a result, the ending in particular feels merely sentimental rather than moving.
Occasionally touching but ultimately insubstantial.
Pik-Shuen Fung’s flawless narration of this apparently semi-autobiographical novel is a pleasure from beginning to end. The nameless characters are an “astronaut family”—the father remains working in Hong Kong while the mother and two daughters move to Vancouver. Listeners travel to both cities in chapters of varying length as the story is told from the viewpoints of one daughter, the mother, and a grandmother. Fung’s soothing voice shares information about Chinese life and culture, showing that little emotion is expressed, including endearments. The daughter wants to become closer to her harsh, judgmental father before he dies. Fung shines at rendering the story’s immediacy and wise sayings, translated from Chinese into English. Although brief, this magical novel offers a vivid portrait of a memorable family. S.B.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Pik-Shuen Fung’s flawless narration of this apparently semi-autobiographical novel is a pleasure from beginning to end. The nameless characters are an “astronaut family”—the father remains working in Hong Kong while the mother and two daughters move to Vancouver. Listeners travel to both cities in chapters of varying length as the story is told from the viewpoints of one daughter, the mother, and a grandmother. Fung’s soothing voice shares information about Chinese life and culture, showing that little emotion is expressed, including endearments. The daughter wants to become closer to her harsh, judgmental father before he dies. Fung shines at rendering the story’s immediacy and wise sayings, translated from Chinese into English. Although brief, this magical novel offers a vivid portrait of a memorable family. S.B.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
