Revenge Of The Mooncake Vixen A Novel

An uproarious debut that lays bare the complicated generational relationships of Chinese American women. Raucous twin sisters Moonie and Mei Ling Wong are known as the “double happiness” Chinese food delivery girls. Each day they load up a “crappy donkey-van” and deliver Americanized (“bad”) Chinese food to homes throughout their southern California neighborhood. United in their desire to blossom into somebodies, the Wong girls fearlessly assert their intellect and sexuality, even as they come of age under the care of their dominating, cleaver-wielding grandmother from Hong Kong. They transform themselves from food delivery girls into accomplished women, but along the way they wrestle with the influence and continuity of their Chinese heritage. Marilyn Chin’s prose waxes and wanes between satire and metaphorical lyric, referencing classical Chinese tales and ghost stories that are at turns sensual, lurid, hilarious, shocking, and surreal.

Moonie and Mei Ling are looked after by their grandmother, an indomitable matriarch, ruthless manager of 'The Double Happiness' restaurant and fount of endless titbits of Chinese mythology. Feared and renowned in the neighbourhood - and stubbornly attached to the giant meat cleaver she keeps in her handbag - eccentric Grandma Wong weaves a magical world of surreal stories and ancient wisdom around her two wayward granddaughters. However, the girls' lives are also being drawn forward by the inexorable pace of assimilation and the ever-beckoning American dream, and as fascinated as they might be by Buddhist philosophy, they are also cool, hip American girls with straight-A grades and scores to settle - with the neighbourhood boys who tease them and with the unforgiving media, which tells them that they should look like Barbie dolls and not like Chinese girls.

A rich, illuminating compilation of selected and new poems from Marilyn Chin, "a poet of contradictions, poignant sentiment, beat-your-ass toughness, and unexpected humor" (Los Angeles Review of Books). Spanning thirty years of dazzling work—from luminous early love lyrics to often-anthologized Asian American identity anthems, from political and subversive hybrid forms to feminist manifestos—A Portrait of the Self as Nation is a selection from one of America’s most original and vital voices. Marilyn Chin’s passionate, polyphonic poetry travels freely from the personal to the mythic, from the political to the spiritual. Deeply engaged with the complexities of cultural assimilation, feminism, and the Asian American experience, she spins precise, beautiful metaphors as she illuminates hard-hitting truths. A Portrait of the Self as Nation celebrates Chin’s innovative activist poetry: her fearless and often confrontational early collections, Dwarf Bamboo and The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty; the rebellious, vivid language of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow; and the erotic elegies of Hard Love Province. Also included are excerpts from Chin’s daring novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, and a vibrant chapter of new poems and translations. In poems that are direct and passionately charged, Marilyn Chin raises her voice against systems of oppression even as her language shines with devastating power and beauty. Image after image, line by line, Chin’s masterfully reinvented quatrains, sonnets, allegories, and elegies are unforgettable.

A fusion of east and west, high culture, popular culture, and ancient Chinese history mark this distinguished collection. In traditional narratives and playful song, Marilyn Chin elegizes the loss of her mother and grandmother and unravels the complexities of her family's past. She sings out the trials of immigration, exile, thwarted interracial love, and social injustice personal revelations leading to a universal cry for compassion and healing.

A sheltered Pakistani girl is sent to America by her parents, with unexpected results: “Entertaining, often hilarious . . . Not just another immigrant’s tale.” —Publishers Weekly Feroza Ginwalla, a pampered, protected sixteen-year-old Pakistani girl, is sent to America by her parents, who are alarmed by the fundamentalism overtaking Pakistan—and influencing their daughter. Hoping that a few months with her uncle, an MIT grad student, will soften the girl’s rigid thinking, they get more than they bargained for: Feroza, enthralled by American culture and her new freedom, insists on staying. A bargain is struck, allowing Feroza to attend college with the understanding that she will return home and marry well. As a student in a small western town, Feroza finds her perceptions of America, her homeland, and herself beginning to alter. When she falls in love with a Jewish American, her family is aghast. Feroza realizes just how far she has come—and wonders how much further she can go—in a delightful, remarkably funny coming-of-age novel that offers an acute portrayal of America as seen through the eyes of a perceptive young immigrant. “Humorous and affecting.” —Library Journal “Exceptional.” —Los Angeles Times “Her characters [are] painted so vividly you can almost hear them bickering.” —The New York Times

Erick Setiawan's richly atmospheric debut is a beautiful, engrossing fable of three generations of women in two families; their destructive jealousies, their loves and losses, their sacrifices and deeply rooted deceptions, and their triumphs. Of Bees and Mist is a fable of one woman's determination to overcome the haunting magic that is created by the people she loves and the oppressive secrets behind their broken lives. Raised in a sepulchral house where ghosts dwell in mirrors, Meridia spends her childhood feeling neglected and invisible. Every evening her father vanishes inside a blue mist without so much as an explanation, and her mother spends her days beheading cauliflowers in the kitchen. At sixteen, desperate to escape, Meridia marries a tenderhearted young man. Little does she suspect that his family is harboring secrets of their own. There is a grave hidden in the garden. There are two sisters groomed from birth to despise each other. And there is Eva, the formidable matriarch whose grievances swarm the air like an army of bees—the wickedest mother-in-law imaginable. Erick Setiawan takes Meridia on a tumultuous ride of hope and heartbreak as she struggles to keep her young family together and discovers long-kept secrets about her own past as well as the shocking truths about her husband's family.

2023 Canada Reads Longlist Selection National Bestseller Winner of the 2019 OLA Forest of Reading Evergreen Award Shortlisted for the 2019 John W. Campbell Memorial Award Shortlisted for the 2019/20 First Nation Communities READ Indigenous Literature Award 2020 Burlington Library Selection; 2020 Hamilton Reads One Book One Community Selection; 2020 Region of Waterloo One Book One Community Selection; 2019 Ontario Library Association Ontario Together We Read Program Selection; 2019 Women’s National Book Association’s Great Group Reads; 2019 Amnesty International Book Club Pick January 2020 Reddit r/bookclub pick of the month “This slow-burning thriller is also a powerful story of survival and will leave readers breathless.” — Publishers Weekly “Rice seamlessly injects Anishinaabe language into the dialogue and creates a beautiful rendering of the natural world … This title will appeal to fans of literary science-fiction akin to Cormac McCarthy as well as to readers looking for a fresh voice in indigenous fiction.” — Booklist A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow. The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision. Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR THE 2021 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR LESBIAN FICTION NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this blazing debut of one family's queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets. One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman's body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighbourhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother's letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth--and that she will have to bring her family's secrets to light in order to change their destiny. With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family's history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.