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A Long Stay in a Distant Land: A Novel |  |
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A Long Stay in a Distant Land: A Novel | |
The Lums, the Chinese-American family Chieng writes about, have a peculiar history. Too many of them suffer an untimely demise: Mom, 51, collision with a car driven by Hersey Collins; cousin Connie, 12, ate a bad cheeseburger; Aunt Julie, 29, stomach cancer; cousin Will, 16, heatstroke; Uncle Larry, 40, fell off a cliff; Grandpa Melvin, 62, struck by an ice cream truck. Louis, the narrator, knows why all this has happened. His Grandpa could have avoided going to WW II, but he saw a Popeye cartoon and was inspired by Popeye's bravery to enlist. "Grandpa had violated the fundamental law that one should not kill another. He'd had a choice. He could have chosen not to join the war and not to shoot people. For every man Grandpa had killed, Death had designated a Lum to be picked off." Who knew where it would end? And now, with the death of Louis's mother, his father, Sonny, is calling him daily to say that he wants to "run down Hersey Collins with his car, or crush his skull with a brick." Louis moves in with his father to keep an eye on him and discovers, in some of the funniest episodes in the book, that his father is a gansta rap-obsessed cuckoo.
One day Grandma Esther calls to tell him that Bo, Louis's uncle and her favorite son, has disappeared in the labyrinths of Hong Kong. Uncle Bo has absented himself for many years, but always kept in touch by filling out a check-list sent by his mother. Now, even that has stopped. Louis goes to Hong Kong to find Bo and, during his search, finds pieces of family history as seen through the eyes of three generations. Every family has stories, true and false, that become part of the dogma passed on to the next generation. In the last chapter, "The Dance of Good Fortune," Chieng leads us to believe that the Lum curse of early Death might be over and that story will become myth. --Valerie Ryan
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
Chieng chronicles three generations of the comically ill-fated Chinese-American Lum family in his whimsical debut. Ever since Grandpa Melvin defied family wishes by enlisting during WWII, the Lums have been cursed by untimely deaths. Living in suburban Orange County, Calif., certainly doesn't protect them from wayward ice cream trucks and E. coli–laced burgers. So when the certified hermit of the family, Uncle Bo—who escaped the suffocating grip of his mother's love by moving to Hong Kong—stops returning her regular form letters, which ask questions like "Do you always plan on waking up the next day?" Grandma Esther suspects the worst. Grandson Louis decides to take a much-needed sabbatical from his father, Sonny—who comforts himself with rap music while calling for revenge on the overtired medical student who crashed into his wife's car and killed her—by traveling to Hong Kong to look for his uncle. Though Uncle Bo's plight remains central, the novel adheres to no strict narrative structure; it dips in and out of the Lum family over the course of half a century, treating readers to delectable nibbles of zany family lore and conjectural genealogies stretching back centuries. Charmingly eccentric and refreshingly unstereotypical, the novel still suffers a bit from its dibs and dabs construction, which can make the story feel too slick to be satisfying. Agent, Dorian Karchmar. (Apr.)
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Chieng's fearless first novel explores three generations of a Chinese American family and the forces that shape their fate. From a poisonous cheeseburger to a plunge from a precarious cliff, the surfeit of casualties suffered by the Lum clan of Orange County, California, hardly seems like coincidence (could it be payback for Grandpa Melvin's service in World War II, inspired, as it was, by a Popeye cartoon?) So when Melvin's adult grandson, Louis, learns of his father's determination to avenge his wife's untimely demise (she was killed by a sleep-deprived medical student who should have never climbed behind the wheel), he moves back in with his old man to prevent him from doing something he'll regret. Father and son make a curious domestic pair. Louis lives a quiet life as a fact-checker at a local hot rod magazine; his father sips malt liquor and listens to "gangsta rap." Soon, Louis' grandmother Esther (the Chinese equivalent of a Jewish mother) gathers the family to discuss the latest drama: the disappearance of Louis' reclusive uncle, Bo, who has been living in Hong Kong. Life lessons await Louis, who travels to Hong Kong determined to find Bo. This is a dazzling debut: poignant, prickly, and deliciously absurd. Allison Block
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