02 Mar / Face by Aimee Liu [in What Do I Read Next? Multicultural Literature]
Maibelle Chung, in spite of her last name, is a tall, curly red-haired woman with green eyes. Her father is Chinese-born, her mother from the Midwest. After years of running away, Maibelle returns to her Chinatown roots, finally ready to start facing the dark secrets of her incongruous, inescapable past.
Each section of the novel is introduced with an anonymous photograph of Chinatown; the powerful images capture an indescribable essence of the famous ethnic neighborhood. In the novel, Maibelle is attempting to do just that, to capture the faces of a changing, fading Chinatown, to preserve those images in a book project on which she agrees to collaborate. The included photographs truly add a sense of suspended real life to an otherwise fictional story.
Review: “Asian American Titles,” What Do I Read Next? Multicultural Literature, Gale Research, 1997
Readers: Adult
Published: 1994