Orphan Bachelors

December 1, 2022

In Why Fathers Cry at Night, Newbery Medalist and New York Times best-selling author Alexander (Swing) blends memoir and love poems, recalling his parent and his first years of marriage and fatherhood as he ponders learning to love (50,000-copy first printing). After abandoning her marriage as the wrong path, Biggs looked at women from Mary Wollstonecraft to Zora Neale Hurston to Elena Ferrante as she considered how to find A Life of One's Own. A celebrated New York-based carpenter (e.g., his iconic Sky House was named best apartment of the decade by Interior Design), self-described serial dropout Ellison recounts how he found his path to Building. Shot five times at age 19 by a Pittsburgh police officer (a case of mistaken identity that amounted to racial profiling), Ford awoke paralyzed from the waist down and learned he was a new father; a decade later, he recounts his path to social activism and An Unspeakable Hope for himself and his son. From the first Black American female designer to win a CFDA Award, Wildflower takes James from high school dropout to designer of a sustainable fashion line showcasing traditional African design to founder of the booming social justice nonprofit Fifteen Percent Pledge (businesses pledge to dedicate 15 percent of their shelf space to Black-owned brands). Minka's fans will proclaim Tell Me Everything when they pick up her hand-to-mouth-to Hollywood memoir (30,000-copy first printing). In Whistles from the Graveyard, which aims to capture the experience of confused young millennials in the U.S. Marines, Lagoze recalls serving as a combat cameraman in the Afghan War and witnessing both bonding with locals against the Taliban and brutality toward innocent people by young men too practiced in violence. To cement ties with his eldest son, star of Netflix's hit Dead to Me, veteran actor and New York Times best-selling author McCarthy found himself Walking with Sam along Spain's 500-mile Camino de Santiago. A first-generation Chinese American with a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, Pen/Faulkner Award finalist Ng (Bone) recounts being raised in San Francisco's Chinatown by the community's Orphan Bachelors, older men without wives or children owing to the infamous Exclusion Act. Thought-provoking novelist Pittard (Reunion) turns to nonfiction with We Are Too Many, an expansion of her attention-getting Sewanee Review essay about her husband's affair with her best friend (80,000-copy first printing). Delighted by all the queer stories she encountered when she moved to Brooklyn, book publicist Possanza uses Lesbian Love Story to recover the personal histories of lesbians in the 20th century and muse about replacing contemporary misogynistic society with something markedly lesbian. In Uncle of the Year, Tony, Drama Desk, and Critics Choice Award nominee Rannells wonders at age 40 what success means and whether he wants a husband and family; 19 original essays and one published in the New York Times. Describing himself as Uneducated (he was tossed out of high school and never went to college), Zara ended up as senior editor at Fast Company, among other leading journalist stints; here's how he did it (30,000 copy first printing.)

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March 6, 2023
In this “book of living memory,” novelist Ng (Bone) examines the cascading effects of U.S. immigration laws on her Chinese family. From Ng’s great-grandfather, a miner who was denied citizenship by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, to her father, who eluded exclusion in 1940 by memorizing the photos, maps, and biographical details of a stranger’s life and passing them off as his own, Ng’s family history is defined by absences and secrets: “Asking was disobedience: children didn’t need to know the whole story,” she writes. Years after the Exclusion Act was repealed and the Eisenhower-era Confession Program, which lured people into confessing illegal entry, revoked her father’s citizenship, rifts within the family remained: the Ng sisters took their father’s original name while their brothers kept the one he’d assumed to stay in the U.S.; their parents’ marriage soured and the siblings became estranged. Grieving the deaths of her mother, father, and youngest brother, Ng returned home to examine her fragmented memories and scraps of handwritten ephemera for glimpses of what might be known of her whole family history, peeling back the lies her father told to survive so she might better understand her place in the world. The author’s straightforward prose and the work’s staggering scope bring home the myriad ways misguided policies damaged generations of immigrant families. Readers will be rapt.

Starred review from April 1, 2023
Each of Ng's exquisite books, Bone (1993), Steer toward Rock (2008), now this, is worth the 15-year wait in-between. After two novels (although her sister has said about her fiction, "'I know where you got everything'"), Ng presents a luminous memoir, finding transformative, aching authenticity in revealing difficult lives. In 1940, Ng's father was one of the infamous Angel Island's final detainees. To circumvent the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which engendered generations of Chinese American "orphan bachelors," Ng's Big Aunt paid $4,000 (today's equivalent, $82,000) for Ng's father to become the paper son of a U.S. citizen. He lost that paper citizenship in 1966 when he entered the Chinese Confession Program; he was legally naturalized in 2001. Exclusion and confession profoundly defined Ng's and her family's identity. As the firstborn to her sailor father and seamstress mother, Ng bore the brunt of responsibility for three younger siblings. Home life was complicated. Deh left for long stretches, leaving Mah overworked, their relationship acrimonious. Ng escaped San Francisco for New York City, but death (of baby brother, father, mother) eventually called her home. Ng pithily encapsulates the decades: "On Being a Confession Baby, Chinatown Daughter, Baa-Bai Sister, Caretaker of Exotics, Literary Balloon Peddler, and Grand Historian of a Doomed American Family." Her exceptional storytelling elucidates and illuminates.

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Starred review from June 1, 2023
The noted fiction writer turns to memoir in this decade-spanning account of Chinese immigrant experiences in America. "In our childhood, my sister and I heard no fairy tales, no love stories. We only heard tales of woe." So writes San Francisco-born Ng, whose parents--"a seamstress who could sew up copies of dresses from sight alone, a sailor who could endure the silence and solace of the seas"--came from China with memories of pain and hunger. Years after arriving in America, her mother would calculate the cost of every meal, including externalities like the gas expended in cooking it, while her father recalled that on the ship that brought him across the ocean, he could mark time by the single hard-boiled egg given to each passenger every Sunday. More, Ng's father had to memorize a "Book of Lies," answers to damning questions that sneaky immigration authorities would raise in quizzing new arrivals to weed out the Chinese, who were barely tolerated after decades of exclusion. Father and daughter forged a bond over languages. In one affecting passage, the author writes of her father's insisting that any discarded paper with writing on it be placed in a special receptacle to be taken to a temple that burned it as sacred material. In another, she recounts the hilarious transcriptions her mother used to pronounce English words--e.g., "Gum bao sui pei (gold precious water fart) was 'Campbell's Soup.' " A luminous West Coast bookend to Ava Chin's Mott Street, Ng's book is not just a family portrait, but also a powerful remembrance of the "orphan bachelors" of San Francisco, single men who arrived from China and, segregated by race and class, never found spouses and grew old in one another's company, never quite at home in a strange land. An exemplary study of the past brought into the present, spanning years and continents.

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