“A wonderful memoir. 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
“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 SHU
“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
FAE MYENNE NG
“Ms. Ng is blessed with a poet's gift for metaphor and a reporter's eye for detail."
— Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Fae Myenne Ng’s work has received support from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, Rome Prize, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the NEA, the Lannan Foundation, and The Radcliffe Institute. She has held residencies at Yaddo, McDowell, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her first novel, BONE, was a finalist for the 1994 PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award. The second, STEER TOWARD ROCK, was awarded a 2008 American Book Award. In 2009, she was a Guggenheim Fellow.
Her memoir ORPHAN BACHELORS will be out in paperback from Grove Press on May 4, 2024.
AUTHOR WEBSITE: FAE MYENNE NG
“Thanks to Ng’s fierce talent and unapologetic honesty, “Orphan Bachelors” is a revelation.”
THE WASHINGTON POST
"Fae Myenne Ng, who was born in San Francisco to parents from China, takes her research, introspection and wisdom accumulated over decades and throws it into a powerful, deeply expressive about the ways the United States’ racist policies nearly crushed her family."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
BEST BOOKS OF 2023
“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
“A luminous memoir, finding transformative, aching authenticity in revealing difficult lives….
Her exceptional storytelling elucidates and illuminates.”
BOOKLIST
STARRED REVIEW AND EDITORS CHOICE 2023
“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
“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
“ORPHAN BACHELORS redefines memoir. 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
“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
“Fae Myenne Ng’s memoir documents the personal legacy of her own family, as well as that of the Chinese community fractured by immigration policy. History is a never-ending story that twists backwards and forward like a wild dragon. We have only to look at our current immigration record, locally and globally, to see that this story is still happening.”
SANDRA CISNEROS
Photo: Emma Marie Chiang
“Luminous…not just a family portrait, but also a powerful remembrance of the ‘orphan bachelors’ of San Francisco, single men who arrived from China and, segregated by race and class, never found spouses and grew old in one another’s company, never quite at home in a strange land. An exemplary study of the past brought into the present, spanning years and continents.”
KIRKUS REVIEWS
STARRED REVIEW
ALSO BY FAE MYENNE NG
