Winner of the American Book Award, the California Book Award Gold Medal for Nonfiction, and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, Orphan Bachelors (Grove, 2024) tells the story of Fae Myenne Ng's (Ethnic Studies) family in San Francisco’s Chinatown and her father’s struggles to secure citizenship. Subtitled “On Being a Confession Baby, Chinatown Daughter, Baa-Bai Sister, Caretaker of Exotics, Literary Balloon Peddler, and Grand Historian of a Doomed American Family,” the memoir spans generations.
In pre-Communist China, Ng's father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger's son, managing to evade the Exclusion Act — the first significant US law to restrict immigration, and a policy that Ng's father believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family. During the McCarthy era, he entered the Confession Program in a failed attempt to salvage his marriage, only to have his citizenship revoked. As Ng's father said, "America didn't have to kill any Chinese; the Exclusion Act ensured none would be born."
Ng was her parents' precocious first born, the translator, the bossy eldest sister. She was a child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by San Francisco's Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors — men without wives or children, Exclusion's living legacy. She and her siblings were their stand-in descendants, Ng's family grocery store their haven.
Each Orphan Bachelor bequeathed the children their true American inheritance. Ng absorbed their suspicious, lonely, barren nature; she found storytelling and chosen children in the form of her students. In this powerful memoir, Ng gives voice to her valiant ancestors, her bold and ruthless Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self.
