There are lost periods in the history of California.  How many people know that well after California banned slavery, entering the Union as a free state in 1850, Chinese girls and women were sold as slaves in California?  Fae Myenne Ng doesn’t want to forget. 

Even at sixty-eight years of age, this celebrated author has a lot to say to younger generations of Chinese in America and to the rest of us children and grandchildren of immigrants. Ng sees herself as a preservationist when the trend is toward assimilation, reminding us of the need to search out the neglected heritage of old stories contained in the lives of our ancestors.  

Ng’s calls her first book, Bone (1993), an “Exclusion novel,” as it is centered on one San Francisco Chinatown family’s experiences resulting from the Exclusion Act of 1882, which basically remained in effect until completely repealed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (aka Hart-Cellers Act). In her Literary Hub essay, “All Stories Float Ashore,” she writes

“Dad… taught me that the told story was dangerous. Silence is an act of protection….“But…I write the books that Exclusion Men kept secret in their center. I tell the muted stories before they mutate. I believe our literature hasn’t caught up with this truth—Exclusion created a new genre—the lie in America.  

Ng calls her second book, Steer Toward Rock (2008), a “Confession novel” as it chronicles how ramifications of the Chinese Confession program (1956-1966), which offered “paper sons” the possibility of naturalization if they signed an affidavit “agreeing to be amenable to deportation,” profoundly alters the lives of another Chinatown family. She says,

“The [Confession] program sent distrust like a plague through family and community so I learned that a true American must feel free to tell—not confess—one’s story.”

Her 2023 memoir, Orphan Bachelors: On Being a Confession Baby, Chinatown Daughter, Baa-Bai Sister, Caretaker of Exotics, Literary Balloo Peddler, and Grand Historian of a Doomed American Family, was inspired by the true-life characters from Ng’s own San Francisco based family and community, especially the last generation of Chinese male immigrants who entered the United States as “paper sons.” Named “orphan bachelors” by Ng’s merchant seaman father, in 1940 he was also one who circumvented the Chinese Exclusion Act by paying 4K for false citizenship papers, which in today’s money would be 85K.  These papers, a “Book of Lies,” which he memorized, made it possible for him to pose as the son of a legal Chinese American citizen. Later, he suffered the consequences, when entering the Chinese Confession program, as he was deported for ten years. Of course his wife and four children who remained in San Francisco also shared this punishment.

In a recent conversation with Fae Myenne Ng, which I was editing as protestors of immigrant roundups clashed with Homeland Security, ICE and National Guard troops in front of a Los Angeles Detention facility, she talks about how her life as the child of immigrants intersects with her writing.

Carla Blank: In your memoir, Orphan Bachelors, you write: “I have borrowed from life to make the story come alive on the page. ‘Borrowing’ is a word my father used to cajole understanding.” I find that so interesting because the art world uses that word, “borrowed,” and they invoke it interchangeably with “appropriation,” or “found,” or sometimes “reinvented.” And I was wondering if you were conscious of and thinking about that doubleness, because I think it’s what contributes, in part, to why your writing is so inventive and resonant. 

Fae Myenne Ng:  Although everybody that I spoke Chinese to has died, it kind of moves through my creative process. Even in my limited Chinese, I feel emotionally rich in a way that I may not in English. I highlight certain words to establish a linguistic emphasis – this is English but with a different register. It’s like putting my foot down on the alphabet. Perhaps it’s a way for me to pause and communicate what I’m searching for in Chinese. Maybe even beyond the Chinese word. Perhaps an ancient sound.  But it’s only an image that I am trying to suggest, that this is a place where we have no word. I come up with an English word–and it’s usually a verb, because they have action and activeness, an animation of language that exists between meaning and translation, an inference of feeling this all comes from the imagistic power of Chinese. How can I make that into English in its beauty? So perhaps that’s why I highlight “haahn,” or “borrowing,” or “pei you,” and then I dance on the “perhaps” to bring the “pei you” into focus. There is something about the image in the Chinese language that is so powerful and so potent and precise that I can distill my feeling into the image. There’s a way that you change how English is spoken when it is conceived in Chinese. I love that you noted “borrowing.” It’s the perfect example. I hear the three elongated syllables to create a Chinese tone of longing, hoping, and probably despairing. 

Carla Blank: It’s very dominant. I kept on coming across it, maybe even in all three of your books. Borrowing also resonates in how this concept of language has relevance to abstractions, which contain a history of human creativity. Because evidence of abstraction goes back as far as we have found remnants of humans’ lives. For instance, geometric shapes are pure abstractions that have been present throughout time. 

Fae Myenne Ng: I think what I was trying to do was create an echo throughout the book.  I got obsessed with how my father would say “pei you,” and I translate it, as I used the word “perhaps.” And so in that moment, my goal as a writer was to bring those two words close together but keep them separate. And then I didn’t want to translate. So the next sentence was, “As a child, I understood it as his way of inviting possibility.” Then I go back to the English, “Perhaps, my father already knew that Mah had told me a story and that by sidestepping that acknowledgement, he freed me.” So I only use the Chinese “pei you” once because it doesn’t register the tone; so it would be very disturbing for a solo mono English reader to keep having to read “pei you” as “pay you.” Maybe I should’ve spelled it y-e-u. See how complicated it is to get it right in English? But you know the difficulty. These are echoes of love and hope and hopelessness and regrets because the book is really dense and I can’t expect anybody to really see everything I want them to see.

Carla Blank:  You mention that the Chinese language contains no differences to indicate time, as English does through verb tenses. How does that effect your writing in English?

Fae Myenne Ng: Oh, that’s really interesting because when I started to write in English, I had a little difficulty with my tenses because there’s no time in Chinese. But when I bring it to English, I have to really think in English and disregard the placement of time that is necessary in the grammar of English. And it doesn’t always come out smoothly, because in Chinese, it’s very smooth. There’s no time. It’s all the time. It’s every time. Everyone’s alive. Everyone’s dead. Everyone cares. Everyone doesn’t. You know, there’s a kind of emerging of timelessness. Whereas in English, you need to be precise. Did it happen yesterday? Did it happen next? Like in legal discourse, they state questions exactly, as in: Did you tell them yesterday? Did you tell her today? Did you tell anyone else ten years ago? 

Carla Blank: Maybe that has to do with part of my experience as a reader of your work, as I feel I only understand some of what you’re saying, which I think is fine. Because you’ve done a masterful job, packing layers of information into every sentence, giving readers plenty to absorb. It’s like when I was directing Pakistani Americans in Wajahat Ali’s play, The Domestic Crusaders, and it included Urdu. The actors asked, “Should we translate?” I answered, “I think it’s good to have secrets. We outsiders should be reminded we can’t know everything.” 

Fae Myenne Ng: Yes. I have this whole feeling about stories and secrets and lies which one would have been taught. There should be some mystery and there should be some respect for not being able to fully understand.  And I think that’s the immigrant experience. So that’s any kind of artistic experience growing up in a country like ours now. 

Carla Blank: Your books called up my own family’s history because I’m a second-generation grandchild of four Russian Jewish immigrants. Much of their lives are secret to me. So when you talk about a “gene of secrecy,” that is also quite profound in my family’s life. For instance, I have arthritis, and genetically, I understand it appeared in the family from way back. Because one story I remember hearing was that my maternal great grandmother remained in Russia, cared for by her youngest daughter, because she was so crippled by arthritis. Except my sisters don’t remember hearing that story. However, you know much more than I, probably because you’re first generation. That’s another thing. I always get mixed up about–naming generations–who’s second generation, third generation. 

Fae Myenne Ng: I call my parents immigrants, and I give them that full glory. They were immigrants, and I am the first generation to be born here. Immigrants are our heroes. They got here. They survived and they procreated. The first generation owes dearly and each succeeding generation owes differently. 

Carla Blank: I also think of my grandparents as the immigrants. My parents are first generation, and I’m in the second generation. 

Today I googled the question, “What immigrant group was limited by the most legislation?” And the AI answer was: “The immigrant group most limited by legislation in the United States was the Chinese. Specifically, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and subsequent related laws, significantly restricted Chinese immigration and impacted Chinese immigrants already in the U.S.” It mentions the Geary Act of 1892, and further extensions and perpetuations that placed bans on Chinese immigration until 1943. And then there were other terrible things that Chinese immigrants experienced in America–you write about the lynchings and massacres of Chinese immigrants. That’s almost completely forgotten history.

Fae Myenne Ng: History is buried. 

Carla Blank: That reminds me to double check if the language in the documents in Steer Toward Rock is taken from actual documents? 

Fae Myenne Ng: Yes. They were from my father’s FBI file – and his interrogation file from Angel Island. In Orphan Bachelors, it ends on the question: how many ancestral tablets do you have in your home? And my father says two. And so ancestral tablets is a huge metaphor, or image or, connection. This is an ancestral tablet. But it’s so subtle that nobody’s really said very much about it. 

Carla Blank: Do the ancestral tablets go on an altar? 

Fae Myenne Ng: The Communist just destroyed that practice because it was feudal. But I call my parents’ generation the vain glorious generation, because they came with nothing. And you have no vanity and no glory, but you just pretend you do because there’s nothing else to do but hope. I learned this because [of an experience with] my Italian translator, [who] I met when I was seventeen and we became really good friends. And she would come visit me when I was living in Manhattan, and she was terrified to see the Feast of San Gennaro parade in Little Italy because Mussolini destroyed all this. And I thought, wow. It’s just like Chinese America, everything pre-1949 that I grew up with because that was what my parents brought. They saved that pre-feudal pre-male culture. They brought it here.  The word “Haahn,” was resurrected and saved from the countryside, and brought here because passing through Hong Kong, it became a whole different word. They don’t have this kind of word [now]. It’s just gone. So in some really small way I wanted to capture that shadow of language that my parents had, which has been destroyed by Communism, and whatever capitalism has swept through China. All these rituals are just hocus pocus, superstitious, and all these words were just thrown by the wayside once the educated classes came, and the commercialization of Chinatown happened. And it’s something that I saw the people hadn’t really respected. 

Carla Blank: Which people are you referring to? People in the United States? Those that came from China? 

Fae Myenne Ng: Let me be more precise. You know, this was part of an old world that was better forgotten. So progress said we don’t do that anymore. We don’t burn incense. We don’t have ancestral tablets. And I thought that it was worthy of preserving into literature because it was one way that the immigrants were able to survive, to hold on to some kind of dignity. 

Carla Blank: Sense of self. 

Fae Myenne Ng: Yes.

Carla Blank: I have this quote in Orphan Bachelors where you refer to your father: “As a child, I believed his stories. As a writer, I write his lies.” And then you also write about your mother: “Perhaps writing was a way to hold her, [my Mah’s] marital bitterness in mind and at bay; writing became my mourning.”

Fae Myenne Ng: Yes. I was glad I was attentive enough to get that down. 

Carla Blank: So Orphan Bachelors was fifteen years in the making? 

Fae Myenne Ng: All my books took about fifteen years. Distilling my father’s lies gave me permission or the confidence to write his truth. He lived and died with these lies that came from the consequences of many, historical, cultural, sociological conditions. They became an integral part of this complete and complex person. And so this is my inheritance. One doesn’t have to forgive; one must perhaps understand. My sister says, “Nobody listened to them except you.”

Carla Blank: But you listened to the orphan bachelors too. So that was just your nature?

Fae Myenne Ng: My father taught me how to listen. Was it my position in birth, [as the first child], or my nature as a writer? 

Carla Blank: A passage in Bone illustrates that your style has a knack for detail: “Leon was a collector too. Stacks of takeout containers, a pile of aluminum tins….His nightstand was a red restaurant stool cluttered with towers of Styrofoam cups, stacks of restaurant napkins, and a cup of assorted fast-food straws.” Then the details continue, finishing with: “On the windowsill were bunches of lotus leaves and coils of dried noodles. There were several tin cans: one held balls of knotted red string, another brimmed with tangles of rubber bands. The third was ashy with incense punks. Beyond these tins, I could see Coit Tower.” 

Fae Myenne Ng: That was an image from my grandmother’s kitchen table. Her table was a collage of collections that spoke of her needs and fears. And then to zoom out to see Coit Tower. Coit Tower is our vision of hope. This passage is my intuition operating. Because in MFA classes now you say, “You have to look for a place that has significance.” Well, god, who has time for that? I’m just saying if it comes to me, I’ll use it. 

Carla Blank: Got to use Coit Tower. It has WPA murals.

Fae Myenne Ng: Exactly. I love the old couple walking hand in hand. That’s the Exclusion marriage. 

Carla Blank: So here’s another quote from Bone: “It took me a minute to catch up with him. I relaxed, remembering that Leon did not like fanfare and ceremony.” Would this also reflect your writing style? Sentences that lack ornament and ceremony, short, direct, not long winded.

Fae Myenne Ng: I want to honor working-class language. This is the world I grew up in. Where’s time? You have to go sew something or cook something.  Say what you need to say and then shut up. An orphan bachelor, Mr. Louie, said to young-chatty me: “Little Sister, I’m old. Say it simply. I’m old.” 

Carla Blank: Have you ever written something that you would call a poem? Because your writing, your language has that depth of resonance, the possibility of multiple meanings that energizes the language of poets.  You did say you were writing poetry in Chinese school.  Is that your first memory of writing?

Fae Myenne Ng: Yes. I wrote my first stories in Chinese when I was in the Chinese school. My favorite subject was Tang poets. And I memorized all the poems. I love the compression in Chinese; I was drawn to the beauty and power in its economy.

Carla Blank: But then you stopped writing in Chinese? 

Fae Myenne Ng: My life in English became larger and I realized that I would never have a living history in Chinese. 

Carla Blank: In still another quote from Bone: “My job is about being the bridge between the classroom teacher and the parents. Teachers target the kids, and I make home visits….” At the end of this paragraph you say, “This job sounds great on paper, but sometimes when I’m face to face with the parent, I get this creepy feeling that I’m doing a bit of a missionary number.” So does the narrator of the novel feel that the American curriculum calls for assimilation into a dominant Anglo culture? Is that why she feels like a missionary?

Fae Myenne Ng: Orphan Bachelors had many more teaching scenes. Half the book was teaching. But my editor said they are too interesting, that they steal the show. I think that may have been the beginning of my trying to understand the difference between duty and desire. About getting the students to think first for themselves. To tease them away from the Confucianism that controlled their grandparents and then the dogma of the Cultural Revolution that controlled their parents. Did I use “assimilation” in the book? I use “missionary.” 

Carla Blank: “Missionary” infers a demand to change. 

Fae Myenne Ng: And subservience. I used “missionary” because I was thinking of Cameron House and the Christian influence in Chinatown.  All the Chinese schools were Christian, and they tried to control us with God. 

Carla Blank: You write about a phase of Chinese American history, the immigrant experience, that modern, assimilated writer shun. Not only Americanized Asian American writers, but Jewish and Italian American writers such as Gay Talese who got a backlash when he said that Italian Americans have no literary tradition. For example in this passage in Bone: “I shifted from one foot to the other. Great. I thought so Leon is hanging with Chinatown drift-abouts. Spitters. Sitters. Flea men in the Square. Mah calls Jimmy Lowe the Mo-yeah-do-Bak. (Mr. Have-Nothing-to-Do). Most of the old guys have nothing to do.” So do you get a backlash from assimilated writers who are embarrassed by someone bringing up the old stories?

Fae Myenne Ng: Probably. “Let them talk,” Mom always said. 

Carla Blank: Are some Chinese, like Blacks, unassimilable? Because in Bone you write: “I use my This isn’t China defense. I remind them ‘We’re in America.’ But some parents take this to heart and raise their voices. ‘We’re Chinese first, always.’ I can’t win an argument in Chinese, and I’ve learned from experience to stop the argument right there, before I lose all my authority.”

Fae Myenne Ng: In Chinatown I was a teacher’s aide. I took the kids out for milk and cookies. I did home visits. At Cal, I try and get my students to consider what they want. Desire before duty. Why become part of America’s economic artillery? 

Carla Blank: Is that one reason that you continue to portray the old-world odors that Americanized writers wish to abandon? For instance, in a Bone passage you write: “A bitter ginseng odor and a honeysuckle balminess greeted me. Younger, more Americanized mothers complained that the baby clothes have absorbed these old-world odors.”

Fae Myenne Ng: This is a language that I can feel. And this is sorrow of these men and women who gave everything and died with nothing. It’s not that I have the ability, but I have the feeling for this world. And I don’t have to manufacture the truth. It’s my job to make it current and to give it a vitality and a meaning, so that people look at the orphan bachelor qualities that we ourselves have.

Carla Blank: Perhaps that’s why your writing is very fresh, very unique.  You once wrote: “Every English word was like a curse. I’m over that now, I think.” For instance, in the midst of your living histories, I noticed ongoing motifs of cars and airplanes. And I’m wondering if this is one way you evoke or ground the reader in the contemporary world.

Fae Myenne Ng: So, the immigrants sailed here, and their children drive, fly, run, swim. My parents ran from the Japanese Imperial Army, the fleeing Nationalists, the approaching Communists –escaping is on our genes.

 Carla Blank: Were your parents proud of you being a writer? 

Fae Myenne Ng: My parents couldn’t read my books in English and when translated, the simplified Chinese was so frustrating they gave up. My mother’s niece had the most stunning response and didn’t realize how insulting she was. “Auntie, but you don’t speak English – How can you raise a daughter who wrote a book?” This goes with my respect for the working class.

Carla Blank: About the last third of Orphan Bachelors I had the feeling, like all of a sudden, it got lighter. Because the beginning was so heavy. And even though your parents are dying and your brother is dying during this time in the book, it just somehow felt like it opened up.

Fae Myenne Ng: I love that. The balance – the light and the weighty – I learned that from the orphan bachelors, to suffer deeply, but then to get free.

Carla Blank: So among themselves, hanging out together, it sounds like the orphan bachelors shared a lot of jokes, that the camaraderie was very strong, and helpful for each other’s survival. 

Fae Myenne Ng: They did and taught me to work with intensity and release. I think to absorb the pain takes a certain ability and to release the pain takes a certain courage.

Carla Blank: That mirrored something in my history. Because three of my grandparents died long before I was born, they became known to me through a few stories. Particularly I know my maternal grandmother died in a mental institution. Although I don’t know what drove her into manic depression, I understood that once a brother moved to Los Angeles for health reasons, she felt isolated by being a Yiddish speaker without family to talk to. Her husband, my grandfather who was alive when I was a child, didn’t talk much. But you could feel the darkness. And of course, my mother was a victim of it. 

Fae Myenne Ng: That’s really hard, the lack of stories, the silence of it. Just seems to grow in the generations. 

Carla Blank: Well my mother, in her late 80s, wrote a memoir. And using the form of a family tree she included the histories of relatives who arrived in the United States. Similar to your understanding of your parents, while writing her memoir, she had a change of heart about how she thought of her father, which was a great gift. 

Fae Myenne Ng: Perfection! 

Carla Blank: Since we all have histories, I think the way you write helps readers, by stirring up thoughts about their histories. You leave a lot of space around the words to ponder. 

Fae Myenne Ng is working on the third installment in her trilogy of novels, “Donatella, Getting Away With It.”

Carla Blank’s most recent book is “A Jew in Ramallah and Other Essays, (Baraka Books, 2024).”  She is working on a memoir, “Anonymous Dancer.”

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