The Year of Finding Memory: A Memoir

by Judy Fong Bates

In the tradition of The Concubine's Children and Paper Shadows , a probing memoir from the author of the acclaimed novel Midnight at the Dragon Cafe .

An elegant and surprising book about a Chinese family's difficult arrival in Canada, and a daughter's search to understand remarkable and terrible truths about her parents' past lives.

Growing up in her father's hand laundry in small town Ontario, Judy Fong Bates listened to stories of her parents' past lives in China, a place far removed from their every-day life of poverty and misery. But in spite of the allure of these stories, Fong Bates longed to be a Canadian girl. Fifty years later she finally followed her curiosity back to her ancestral home in China for a reunion that spiralled into a series of unanticipated discoveries. Opening with a shock as moving as the one that powers The Glass Castle , The Year of Finding Memory explores a particular, yet universal, world of family secrets, love, loss, courage and shame. This is a memoir of a daughter's emotional journey, and her painful acceptance of conflicting truths. In telling the story of her parents, Fong Bates is telling the story of how she came to know them, of finding memory.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, China, Canada, Biography Memoir, Biography, Family

304 pages, Hardcover

First published April 13, 2010

About the author

Judy Fong-Bates is a Chinese-Canadian author who was was born in China. She came to Canada in 1955 with her mother after her father was established in Ontario. Her father operated a hand laundry when they came to Canada. She grew up to become an elementary school teacher in the city of Toronto, and has also taught creative writing at the University of Toronto. She currently lives with her husband on a farm in Southern Ontario.

Midnight at the Dragon Cafe was chosen as a notable book in 2006 but the American Library Association; in 2008 it received the Alex Award.

Reviews

[Emmkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a thoughtful and interesting memoir. Judy Fong Bates came to Canada as a very young child and grew up in small-town Ontario, where her parents ran a Chinese laundry. Her childhood was replete with bitter, angry conflict between her parents, neither of whom were happy with their life in Canada or with each other. When she was a young woman, her father hanged himself (as we learn on the first page of the book). Only in her 50s does she travel back to China, where she visits her ancestral village, meets an older sister for the first time, and begins to delve into her parents' lives and relationship before her. Bates' descriptions of the Pearl Delta area of China are beautiful, and she provides wonderful details of food, gardens, even the misery and embarrassments of life in the laundry as she was growing up. Her efforts to gain some insight into what made her parents tick are sensitive, careful, and ultimately very poignant.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved reading this book and recommend it to anyone who enjoyed The Glass Castle. It was moving right from the beginning and I found Judy's descriptions of her memories of her parents and their experience as immigrants in Canada impactful. I especially loved reading about the trips to China she and her husband took to meet family members and learn about others she didn't realize she had for the first time.

Judy taught my two daughters in elementary school. In fact, she was one of the best teachers they had in their early school years. And to read about her life experiences in this book has impressed me that we can't always really know those we love the most in life, or what motivates them, unless we take the time to ask, or tell, or follow our memories like Judy did in this book.

I am blown away by the story telling ability of this talented author. I look forward to reading "Midnight at the Dragon Cafe" at my earliest opportunity!

[jenica · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The story of my family is filled with ghosts, their presence resonating from beyond the grave. In the course of a year, their whispers have turned my doubt and arrogance into a richer sort of knowing, and I have watched my parents grow into fully fleshed human beings. At the same time they have also turned into strangers. The more I find out about them, the further they are removed from the people who eked out a living in a small-town hand laundry.”

This is the second memoir I've read, and again, I feel sooo silly critiquing someone's life story lol??? Particularly their journey of learning about their family history, but we go on regardless. ALSO this book was for my Canadian Lit class, and we have yet to discuss it so I might be coming back here in a few weeks to add things if someone says something that changes my mind. ALSO ALSO THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOK JUDY FONG BATES IS GOING TO BE COMING TO MY CAMPUS IN NOVEMBER WOWOWOW. No idea if I'll actually be able to like ask her questions, but again, I just might come back. I know everyone is always very eagerly awaiting my verdict on shit so babes keep yourself on your toes.

In Judy Fong Bates's memoir The Year of Finding Memory, Fong Bates takes us with her in her suitcase as she travels from childhood/current homeland Canada to ancestral homeland China. Through conversations with family, she collects bits and pieces of the life her late parents lived, as well as family lore of which she had previously been unaware. During moments of reflection and traversing Chinese villages, we explore (get it) complicated family relationships, hardship and sacrifice, the experiences of immigrants in Canada, and more oh my!!

Now right off the bat, as the child of an immigrant, there were many TOO REAL moments. Being an immigrant in Canada is a whole thing, and being the child of one is another. The biggest thing regarding the latter is the difference between yourself and other family members who grew up/live in your ancestral home country. Fong Bates has half-siblings who grew up in China and therefore have memories and experiences in their country, and with each other, that she cannot fully relate to. There’s loss of culture and language, and Fong Bates just talks about that rift between herself and her family, and it is so fucking real!! I have a fuck ton of cousins in the Philippines and I fear I will never truly be able to connect to them. At one point, Fong Bates talks about how her Chinese isn’t nearly as refined as her English (vine boom because literally me with Tagalog), and she says “This language [English] had claimed my soul. I was a willing captive.” ……. Me getting ready to dedicate my life to English literature ERMMM. Like this experience is soooo common and so fucking sad. It's that feeling of being hella whitewashed or westernized, and it's very evident when you go to your family's country of origin.

With regard to Fong Bates’s parents’ experience as immigrants, we see that the grass isn’t always greener in ole Canada. On one hand, her parents made sacrifices in order to secure a safer life since China’s social and political climate during the 20th century was becoming very, very grim. The historical aspects of China that Fong Bates touches on is fairly brief, but she goes into some depth on how her mother, father, siblings, and other family members were heavily affected, particularly under the Communist regime. So while yes, life in a comparatively free country would be better, the cultural isolation and alienation her parents experienced was debilitating. Like even though her parents went through some SHIT in China during their youths and adulthood, again amidst the harsh social-political environment, the lack of familiarity and self-assertiveness they felt in Canada was a different sort of hurt.

The quotation above is one of my favourites, and fucking perfectly captures how it felt to read this book. As I read more about her family, particularly her mother and father, all these people came alive to me. Fong Bates writes about her parents especially with such care that genuinely can only come from a daughter who is trying to piece together the story of her own familial identity and the key players in it. I’m sitting here typing this out and thinking back on the things she shares about the sort of people her father and her mother were, and I get the sense of having actually having met them. There’s so much complexity in a life, and the more Fong Bates shares as she herself learns new information at the same time, the more answers we get as well as questions. I hope her family is doing well and that her mother and her father are someplace happy :( because their stories made me sad as hell. Immigrant parents man, the stuff they tell you could make you weep.

I had moments reading where I felt almost like an intruder on these people’s lives. As Fong Bates tries to thread things together, the way she does so, the way she imagines certain scenes of the past unfolding, literally feels like I’m watching a movie. And I mean, I’m a bit of a nosy bitch just a little just a tad, and I couldn’t help but think that this is the reason why I love stories that revolve around families. Human beings and the relationships they share tend to be compelling by default, but when they also happen to be related and/or have grown together? I’m sooooo in. And every family has something in their history that is either messy as hell, dark, sad, happy, jaw-dropping, or all of the above and more. And then when you find out about it and the pieces start to fit together…..yo. I was sort of eating the drama up Fong Bates, I can’t lie. But then I started thinking about how these are real people, which made me wonder if her parents ever imagined their stories would be told and known this way. The Year of Finding Memory is honestly inspiring me to start keeping a consistent journal hold up.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to rate memoirs AAAAAAA like even if I thought someone’s life story was boring or unremarkable, there’s still some stuff to dissect I think!! This isn’t about you though, Judy Fong Bates, The Year of Finding Memory is getting a four from me because I very well could one day find myself in the same position as you madam. Personally, my family history has always ALWAYS been so inaccessible to me because of lost family documents (two (2) house fires), the fact that I only know one mf side of it (any FATHERLESS BITCHES in the chat??), and general weak communication capabilities (I’m too much of a coward to ask my family questions + I suck at speaking Tagalog). Until I’m older and braver though, I will stick with the very-close-to-home tales told by writers and memory searchers like Fong Bates ^_^

[Morgan Dhu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Judy Fong Bates describes her book, The Year of Finding Memory: A Memoir as a work of “creative non-fiction.” It is a story, but not necessarily “the” story, of her family’s journey from Kaiping County, in Guangdong Province, southern China, to Canada, their lives in Canada, and the family and homes they left behind in coming to Gam Sum, North America, the Golden Mountain.

Fong Bates’s family is a complex one, with a complicated story of crossing borders - these days, we’d call it a melded family. Her father Fong Wah Yent had married in China, but came to Canada originally as a single man with his brother, leaving his wife and children behind. Though he travelled back to China several times, due to the passage of racist immigration laws, it would be years before he would be legally able to bring any of his family - which had grown to include three sons Hing, Shing, and Doon, and a daughter Jook - to Canada. But before that time, his first wife would die, and he would return to China and remarry, a widow with a daughter of her own, Ming Nee. But his plans to spend the remainder of his life in China ended with the Communist revolution, and in 1949 he returned to Canada, where he was finally able to sponsor his new wife Fong Yet Lan and unmarried children under the age of 21 - Hing and Jook remained in China, Shing, Doon, Ming Nee, and his youngest child - the author, Judy Fong Bates - by his new wife, were allowed to enter the country.

The occasions which prompted Fong Bates to write this memoir were two journeys to China, the first undertaken by the Canadian siblings, Shing, Doon, and Fong Bates herself, accompanied by their spouses, to China, to reconnect with the surviving members of their divided family still living there, the second by Fong Bates and her husband. In the first part to this memoir, Fong Bates intersperses her account of her experience returning after decades to a birthplace she left as a very small child, with her memories and reconstructed stories of her family’s life in Canada. The second part continues to tell her memories of visiting China with her siblings, and of her own childhood in Canada and her parents lives in both countries, but begins to weave into the narrative web elements of her current life as a middle-aged Chinese-Canadian author living in a small town in Ontario with her white husband. Two strands become three, then four as she writes about her second return to China in part three of the book.

Much of the book echoes with the vast differences between Fong Bates’ memories of her parents, and the stories about then that she discovers on her journeys to China. Her memories are of sad, defeated, often bitter, people, unhappy in their marriage, worn down from years of working in their laundry to clean the clothing of people who offered them no respect or understanding. Missing their homeland, their plans for a comfortable life together in China destroyed by the Communist revolution. Cut off from relatives, friends, culture, in a foreign land, sacrificing and denying themselves even the smallest comforts to send money home to numerous relatives struggling to survive under Communist rule. The stories she hears are of a respected, well educated woman, the best school teacher her father’s village had ever known, and a well-loved Gold Mountain visitor, generous, learned, who cared for each other, but were thwarted in their love by her father’s first wife, who refused to allow him to take a second wife into the home.

“The story of my family is filled with ghosts, their presence resonating from beyond the grave. In the course of a year, their whispers have turned my doubt and arrogance into a richer sort of knowing, and I have watched my parents grow into fully fleshed human beings. At the same time they have also turned into strangers. The more I find out about them, the further they are removed from the people who eked out a living in a small-town hand laundry. I cannot connect this charming, much-admired and respected woman to my sharp-tongued mother, consumed by bitterness. I cannot connect this confident man with high standing in his community to the diminished man whom I knew as my father, to the man who ended his life at the end of a rope. My parents were unhappy exiles in the Gold Mountain, shadows of their former selves. I am left aching to know the man and the woman who knew each other before I was born. Whatever truth I now hold feels insignificant and false.”

The Year of Finding Memory is at once an exploration of the universal nature of family histories, with their tensions, secrets, losses, fragmented stories, enduring connections and bitter disappointments, and the particular experiences of Chinese immigrants in North America, a place that seemed so alluring that its name in China meant the Golden Mountain, but which was for so many a daily struggle to survive in the midst of cultural shock and racism that ranged from the thoughtlessly callous to the brutally violent. It tells of families torn apart by ruthless immigration policies, messages of deception concealing from those left behind the difficulties of live in a new country that valued neither the people who came to its shores nor the back-breaking labour they undertook. Of obligations to send money home to those suffering under first the invasion of Imperial Japanese forces and then the Communist regime and the Cultural Revolution, when those who were safe from these horrors, at least, had barely enough to live on themselves. And it tells of the healing and becoming whole that comes of finding unknown family, piecing together the fragments of past lives only partially known and understood.

Fong Bates’s memoir of her families is rich in profound emotional truths but never sentimental or overwrought. She gives us all the facets, fragments, from her own memories and the shared remembrances of others, slowly building pictures of her parents’ lives that hint at the unrealised possibilities taken from them by the forces of history. We watch as the lives of her siblings, cousins, and the extended web of family and neighbours her parents had known in China become as real to her as her own memories, and her own life in a country that is hers as it was never her parents’.

It’s a powerful book, a vital living story, rich and rewarding on many levels.

[Debbie Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I was a Chinese girl living in a white world.”
Read this book for my Canadian literature class, and this is one of the first memoirs that I have read. I can’t believe that next month I will have the opportunity to meet with Judy Fong Bates! I enjoyed this memoir and related lots to it as a second generation Chinese Canadian. I have never been to China and have never visited most of my relatives. I don't know much about my story but there were so many parts of this book where I remembered I heard something just like that and there were moments I related so much to this book. I'm not sure how to rate this book because it is like rating someone's life but I knew I was going to enjoy Judy Fong Bates memoir and I honestly did. We have yet to discuss this in class but there were moments where this book was just too relatable.

[Geetha · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is the daughter of Chinese Immigrants to Canada and her memoir chronicles her trips back to China to connect with her roots, but more importantly to understand her parents. We are all the sum total of the stories of our lives and often children do not understand their parents only because they do not know the stories of their parents’ experiences. On two trips Judy Fong Bates pieces together the story of her parents’ lives. The reader wishes she had done this while her parents were still alive so she could have told them “I Understand”.
This then is the story of a child’s discovery of her parents’ past leading to her better understanding of them; it is also a poignant story of an immigrant’s life. An immigrant comes to a new country in search of a better life and there is much to be gained by that, but much is also lost in the transfer . The author’s parents do not speak English. Her father is an intellectual reduced to hand washing clothes in his laundry in Canada. Her mother came from a well respected family and was a teacher, before she came to Canada. At one time in China they were in love, discussed Confucius, laughed, ran a business. This is what Fong Bates finds out about them, not how she knew them. The father she knew was a diminished man, diminished by years of indignity and humiliation. The mother she grew up with was full of bitterness, bitter that life did not give her what she deserved. The hardships of life had dried up all their love.
The book is slow, quiet and thoughtful as the author records all her observations, thoughts and feelings. Her parents’ past is gradually revealed and the reader, along with the author, comes to know them better. Descriptions of rural China, Chinese customs, the Cultural Revolution and its impact, racist policy against the Chinese in Canada (Exclusion Act which prevented the Chinese from sponsoring family to Canada, the infamous head tax) and other historical & cultural details add to the book.
The prose is simple and the author does a remarkable job as she goes back and forth between various times and places.
This is not a book for lovers of action or those looking for an exciting read. It is the kind of book you will think about, discuss with friends and relate to.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Judy Fong Bates writes a very moving account of her quest to learn more about her family and their roots in China. She lived as a small child with her mother and half-sister in Hong Kong before moving to Ontario to join her father, who owned a small Chinese hand laundry, a job of unceasing labour. Her depictions of her experiences visiting mainland China to be reunited with her older half-sister and niece and other relatives, are interesting as we hear the voices from her youth compared with the present-day realities. These Chinese relatives have almost universally suffered under Communism and the Cultural Revolution, working in the fields, deprived of education. Judy feels some guilt at her remembrances of her youth, which although not totally care-free, has involved, comforts, friends and education. She discovers that her mother sent money regularly from Canada (Gold Mountain) to support many of her family members in China and realizes what a difference even small amounts made in their lives. One of her mother's cousins tells her that it saved them from starvation! It is a story which was probably repeated many times as China went through hard times during and after the war. Yet Judy realizes that the high esteem which people like her parents were held in by their mainland Chinese relatives, didn't totally reflect the realities with which the resident Canadian Chinese dealt with -- isolation from their culture, friends and family, a harsh, inhospitable climate where they couldn't easily grow their traditional vegetables and rejection from others in their locales. A very thoughtful read.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Judy Fong Bates is a skilled writer, unsparing of herself and others as she uncovers misunderstandings and misconceptions about her parents. She chronicles two trips to China after both of her parents are gone, and talks to people who knew them. Many of their recollections don't jibe with what she knew or how she viewed those two people whose loveless marriage, and her father's suicide, left her with so many unanswered questions. Fortunately, she married a great guy who accompanied her on those trips, and helped her to sort out her feelings -- or at least left her lone when she needed to do it herself.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this work of creative nonfiction.

If I had to summarize the plot in a few words I would say it is an autobiographical account of a child of immigrant parents who slowly uncovers the hidden truths about the parents she thought she knew well.

As a descendant of family from the Four Counties, I can appreciate how difficult it is to write an honest and sympathetic portrait of a traumatic event and reflect on one’s own actions. The author succeeded in bringing her distant and closer memories into cohesion, resolving conflicts, and finding lessons from the experience. She often decried her inability to read or write Chinese but this reader envied her language skills.

The novel begins by describing a box of papers that the author finds after her father’s death. Among the papers is a head tax certificate, stamped with entry and re-entry dates. It’s these papers that set the stage for the rest of the story. The search for personal family history is called genealogy. The author embarks on what becomes a multi year genealogical journey where she finds unknown family and learns who her parents were before they became the people that she knew. She becomes interested in the country, food, and places that they knew growing up. She learns the harsh history and why war and conflict scattered her family and kept them apart. It is hard for children to see their parents as anything other than a parent - to learn their motivations, to meet their friends, to hear about their dreams, and to see how their choices opened or closed doors in their lives. Indeed, the author remarked that her mother often treated her as a child while her father worked ceaselessly in a humiliating job. There is no doubt that they loved her but there was never an opportunity for leisure and reflection.

This is the first work I have read from this author and I will be looking out for her other works. Very well done.

[Haoyan Do · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second book about Asian immigrants that I have read, the first of course being "Joy Luck Club". As a fellow Asian immigrant, I can totally relate with the hardship the author's parents went through. As a fellow Asian immigrant, I almost feel guilty to point out that we have several local laundry places I sometimes visit, most owned by Asian immigrants, none of them being polite. Every time when there is any transaction between us, I feel that they are scolding me with their eyes if not spoken words. However this is beside the point. I still feel overwhelmed by the deepest respect for the author's father, who tried so hard to work for his own family, toiling in the job other people don't want, sending money to his native village. When he went back to Canton, he tried to establish schools, hire teachers, and later save other people from political turmoils. He is the real hero in this book. He did his best for the people around him through his diligence and his self sacrificing. However his presence is also the weakness of the book. The author doesn't know her father that well and didn't communicate with him as much. So the most admirable character in this book is also the most ignored character in this book.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look at how one young woman grew-up in two small Ontario towns, set-upon a laundry business that was owned by her father, a hardworking Chinese man. Judy Fong Bates gives us a rare glimpse into the values that were instilled upon her as a young woman growing-up in a traditional setting, with many references to 'the old country', as Judy tried to navigate her life on Canadian soil. Judy also refers to her two voyages to China, in which she meets various family members that tell her of stories from the past, many of which involved her parents directly. I liked reading about how Judy learned of her family's history, as seen through the eyes of different individuals. It was intriguing to know what lengths Judy's parents took in order to have a better life as a 'gold mountain' man/woman. I loved learning about what certain euphemisms meant, with Judy trying to become her own woman as a result of her lifelong journey in a traditional Chinese home. Through Judy's two trips back to the motherland, the author gives us a glimpse of the setting in which Judy's life began, with many vivid descriptions of the landscape, demography, and culture. Overall, a well-written piece on how traditional family values can shape one's future for years to come.

[Sylvia Deweerd-hoogkamp · Rating 3 out of 5]

The overall story is good but sometimes the author got stuck writing about minute details that I could care less about.

[Michel Boissonneault]

Started the book on Saturday Tuesday March 16, 2019 and finished it on Sunday April 7, 2019.

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bates moved with her parents from China to Canada when she was still very young—her parents sought to escape the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution and give her and her half siblings a more stable life. And they did, but at a crushing price: her parents, who never learned to speak English, spent forty years in a country that did not really want them, working long hours to make ends meet running a laundry business. Worse, their success was incomplete, as not all of Bates's half siblings, who were significantly older than she was, could emigrate with them. It was not until Bates was well and truly an adult that she met Jook, her father's daughter, who had stayed in China.

When I spoke to Shing [Bates's half brother] about the money [for her half sister's funeral], he said that he and Doon wanted to honour Jook's memory. He reminded me once again that after their mother had died, it was Jook who cared for them, who scavenged the food, cooked it and kept them alive. "She was our only sister," Shing said to me. His statement startled me. I almost blurted out, What about me? I'm your sister. Don't I count? But in that moment I understood that I had not been a part of their childhood. And so I didn't play a role in their grief. My brother's words revealed just how much the three of them had remained bound by their early experiences, the sadness of all those years apart adding to the depth of their loss. (274)

It was not until her adulthood, too, that Bates really began to understand what her parents had gone through, first in China and then in Canada. As a child she did not fully understand their poverty and isolation, but more than that she did not understand the problems they had left behind, and she did not understand her parents' unhappy marriage:

At these times she just assumed that I had taken her side. But I hated hearing these confessions and wanted to hurl blame at her. You're the one who asked him to marry you! And so I became a reluctant receptacle for my parents' mutual contempt. When I looked at them I could feel these secrets, alive inside me, hissing at each other like angry snakes. I wanted to release them and be rid of them. Instead, I carved my heart into deep compartments, a place for each secret, never allowing one to touch the other. (186)

This was a marriage of a lot of things: convenience and desperation and security and unfulfilled hope. Bates didn't have the sort of relationship with her parents that would allow her to ask the questions that she'd have needed to to fully understand the hows and whys of their choices, but upon her return to China as an adult, she started to piece together their histories. This is the result: as many questions as answers in places, but a nuanced portrait of a messy family relationship where much remained under the surface.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written memoir. I was sure it was going to be good as I'd also read Judy Fong Bates' first book titled: "Midnight at the Dragon Cafe".

In this memoir, Judy and her husband Michael travel to China where Judy wants to re-discover her Chinese roots and visit old family members. Upon her arrival there, she is surprised to meet relatives she never knew she had.

As a youngster she had come to Canada with her Mother and Father and sat in a small, cramped one-man laundry all day. Her father worked extremely long hours in the laundry he began in Acton, Ontario and had no time for a social life or time to play with Judy. Her mother and father fought constantly making her wonder why they ever married in the first place.

Part of her return back to China was to try and discover why her parents married and what exactly made them so unhappy. I don't want to spoil the story so I'll let you discover the rest on your own.

[Doreen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was very turned off by this book.
The cover described it as "a writer's act of love" but that was not my experience at all. I felt that Bates showed great disdain towards her parents and little love for who they were and how they came to live the life they shared with her in Canada. Her parents were from the same region as my father and some of her descriptions of places and things rang similar to stories that my father shared during the last years of his life. Most striking was her visit to the fortresses that remain in parts of rural China.
I wondered a couple things--perhaps if she has taken more time to process her experiences of her trip back she might have been more gentle and understanding of her parents. A good editor could have also have made a difference in helping her to step back and gain some perspective.

[Donna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am sorry I cannot rate this higher; I had expected lush, lyrical prose, and instead got overdone turkey: What should have been a warm account of delving into her ancestors' history and homeland turned, in Ms Bates' hands, into a dry narrative with barely a pulse. I couldn't wait to finish as I became so bored by the repetition I just wanted to move onto my next book (and I couldn't just stick it in my "currently reading" limbo forever, as this was lent to me) While disenchanting, the history of this author's family did fascinate me, I wanted to know what would happen next; which is why I gave two stars and not one: I did care about the "characters." My interest extends enough that I would be fascinated to read some of Judy's fiction to see if she has a more vested prose in characters not quite so close to her heart.

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read any of the fiction Judy Fong Bates has written, but this non-fiction is her story of growing up in southern Ontario as a Chinese immigrant and is a very thoughtful piece. She has an image of who and what her parents are, and their marriage. She travels as an adult to China and visits half siblings and sees the towns/villages where her parents grew up. She develops more of an understanding of who her parents were, and the sacrifices they made to leave before the Communists took over.

There is everything honest about Judy's telling of her childhood, even her embarrassment of her parents in terms of how they fit into the community, and how they fought all the time and showed little affection towards each other.

Beautifully written.

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm really surprised that I didn't have more of an emotional reaction to this book. I have read both of Judy Fong Bates' previous books, and I really liked them. In this one, she travels back to China and examines the story of her parents. It's a revealing book at Chinese history, the sacrifices made, and stories told by people who moved to "Gold Mountain". I enjoyed this book and thought it was very interesting, but was not moved as much as I thought I would be.

I would dearly like my mom and aunts to read this book and tell me their opinions, as our ancestors are from another village near to the village where Fong Bates' father grew up.

[Coneill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It was a beautifully and candidly rendered account of one woman's exploration of her family history in order to gain a better understanding of her upbringing and what her parents must have gone through. I thought it was a sympathetic look at the difficulty assimilating in a foreign culture which rang very true for me, being a second generation Canadian of European background. Despite a person's past, we all come with our own unique character and some people have a greater ability to adapt than others but who can judge. Very insightful.

[Jaime · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't really like this book. It was very drawn out and quite repetitive. I understand that the author was trying to see the roots of her ancestry, and wanted to question a lot of her parents relationship through the relatives that are still alive. But it doesn't seem like she got a lot of answers in the end. I enjoyed the other book Midlnight at the Dragon Cafe more.

[Lech Lesiak]

Pretty good read. She delves into her family background in Canada and China. Father ran a hand laundry in Ontario for years, and hanged himself around age 80. She went back to China a couple of time with her Caucasian husband to meet her extended family, and to find out more about her parents' live in pre-Communist times.

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an elegant book about a Chinese familys difficulty when they immigrated to Canada. By going back to China, the daughter searchs and is able to better understnad the remarkable and terible truths about her parents past lives.

[Djdee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good read.I could identify well with the author.Her trip down memory lane was endearing.I feltlike I went along with the author back to China, seeing things through her eyes.I would highly reccommend this book.Nice memoir.

[Kathleen McRae]

A woman searches for an understanding of her parents past and why they became beaten and embittered as the parents she knew.Some of the answers she discovered on her journey to their ancestral homes in China provided insight on a cultural and historical level

[Peggygillies · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read, like a visit with a friend. Thought provoking.
I learned more about Chinese people immigrating to Canada in the early
part of the last century and more about Chinese family values.

[Kelley Plane · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my fave canadian authors. This memoir traces her parents marriage and immigration to Canada through her chinese relatives and her visits to china. It was very touching and beautiful. She finds family and a new side to her parents as well as finds her roots.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, it's been a long time since I was on Goodreads (I've been keeping a written list, but not reviewing them). I remember this as kind of an uneven book; the modern-day China parts that framed it seemed like a mediocre travel story, while the historical parts were more interesting.

[Lyse Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. The author's memoir about her struggles to understand her parents' Chinese culture as she grew up in Canada trying to fit in. She travels to China with her husband to discover their lives and her roots.

[Veronica · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book that contrasts life in China and that in Canada. I found it a bit tedious because Judy Bates is frequently complaining about knowing very little about her parents' life when they lived in China. Yet it is interesting to compare our lives with those in China.