25 Mar / Golden Mountain: Beyond the American Dream by Irene Kai [in AsianWeek]
It starts out interestingly – although predictably – enough with a Chinese great-grandmother whose Gold Mountain husband returns with great riches, a grandmother who marries down but is saved from the Cultural Revolution by escaping to Hong Kong, and the requisite heartless unattainable mother who abused and neglected her children in Hong Kong as well as in the new world. Which then still leaves the reader with over 200 pages of what prove to be a whiny, self-absorbed me, me, me treatise on too much sex, drugs, and who cares about the rock ‘n’ roll. Oh by the way, the book is classified as an autobiography, but you can’t help wonder how the author could possibly have known the exact details of the lives of these three generations of women who preceded her.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, March 25, 2004
Readers: Adult
Published: 2004