Praise for Orphan Bachelors

Booklist Editors' Choice

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year and San Francisco Chronicle "Favorite Fiction and Nonfiction Books of 2023" Selection

"An exemplar of the historical memoir . . . Ng memorializes an enclave stuck in time, its demographics twisted by cruel constraints." --The Atlantic

"Paints her story with flourish . . . Ng's narrative might be likened to a figurative oil work, with structured lines building layers of her family's history." -- New York Times

"Beautifully written, powerfully informative and never boring.... Thanks to Ng's fierce talent and unapologetic honesty, Orphan Bachelors is a revelation." -- Washington Post

"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." -- Publishers Weekly

"Each of Ng's exquisite books, Bone (1993), Steer toward Rock (2008), now this, is worth the 15- year wait in-between... Ng presents a luminous memoir, finding transformative, aching authenticity in revealing difficult lives... Her exceptional storytelling elucidates and illuminates." -- Booklist, starred review

"Luminous... An exemplary study of the past brought into the present, spanning years and continents." -- Kirkus, starred review

"Intimate and evocative... Ng's grace as a storyteller makes it possible to understand in one's bones how heartless policy bends and misshapes lives for generations." -- BookPage

"By turns horrifying, hilarious and moving, Orphan Bachelors is a book that needed to be written. I was mesmerized by its intensity and haunted by its candor; it grips the reader and does not let go." -- Gish Jen, author of The Resisters

"Orphan Bachelors is so many treasures at once: an enthralling memoir, an act of reckoning, a history of American exclusion and Chinatown resilience, an attempt to conjure the vast horizons that her forebears were never allowed to imagine. Orphan Bachelors is the culmination of Ng's brilliant career." -- Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

"Vividly connects Chinese immigrant history to the Asian American present--telling of a life built in a nation insistent on exclusion." -- Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer

"Aha! So that's what became of the men who went to sea. Aha! So that's what that word--that sound--means. Oh, so I am not alone. Fae Myenne Ng's memoir helps the reader recover memories, and to know lost history." --Maxine Hong Kingston, author of I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

"Ng is part of a literary revolt that argued that it is not enough to be patted on the head for writing beautifully, which she does, but like Ng, one can be the archivist and librarian of the communities' stories before they become extinct. Fae Myenne Ng continues to be among the globe's finest writers." -- Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo

"No one else has written about the Exclusion era with such tenderness, intimacy, and hard-core fury. Sharp, bitter, tender, and funny, Orphan Bachelors teases out profound truths that vibrate with a bitter history, making my teeth chatter with anguish, curiosity, dismay. A helluva book." --Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces

"Fae Myenne Ng's memoir is devastating in its account of the human costs of the Chinese Exclusion Act and how those played out in one tough but beleaguered family. Her writing is flinty but openhearted, blessedly direct but charged with poetry that rises straight from experience. There is not one ounce of fat in this book, not a grain of self-pity or sentimentality or rhetoric. It is a wonder." -- Lucy Sante, author of Low Life

"Ng's memoir documents the personal legacy of her own family, as well as that of the Chinese community fractured by immigration policy. We have only to look at our current immigration record, locally and globally, to see that this story is still happening." -- Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

"Ng digs deep into ancestral bones, raw family wounds, historical and contemporary societal trauma, even exotic animal life--weaving a riveting and profound exploration into her essential self. A mind-expanding memoir that I will read again and again." -- Helen Zia, author of Last Boat out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese who Fled Mao's Revolution

"Fae Myenne Ng chose to be a writer because, she felt, 'I had the gung fu for it.' She sure did. She's written a black belt of a book. Reading her vivid narration of her family's endless balancing act of being Chinese and American, I suddenly run into what sounds like a haiku. That's how lyrical her writing is, sometimes as musical as Cantonese poetry, other times as harsh as the Toishan dialect, employed in curses like 'Wow your mother!' or 'Dai pow, ' meaning 'pulling a big gun, ' or telling a good story. Fae tells a good story. Pow! Wow!" -- Ben Fong-Torres, author of The Rice Room

"Haunted by the Orphan Bachelors' never-born progeny, Fae Myenne Ng births a future by remembering them, their lived desires and endurance, honoring and inscribing their lives into the poetic songs and ancestral tablet that is this memoir. How many years ago, Ng penned the unforgettable and luminous novel, Bone, and today we are gifted with Orphan Bachelors. The circle closes." -- Karen Tei Yamashita, author of I Hotel

"A must-read for anyone interested in learning the personal repercussions of the Asian Exclusion Laws and the relentless persecution of Chinese immigrants during the Red Scare, in aching prose that zips and zooms . . . This historically informed yet intimate memoir pulsates with the author's big heart, and that of her extensive family." -- King-Kok Cheung, Professor of English at UCLA

"Ng's observations, her sharp eye and sharp ear, bring her surroundings to life and memorialize not only a particular time and place, but a timeless wisdom. Her gift is to both to retain and to transform, as she finds new, creative ways to honor the past, to mourn and to celebrate." -- Anne Twitty, Professor of History at Stanford University and winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation