Meet me tonight in Atlantic City A memoir

Her friend coins the term, or the wish for, Wongmom.com, "Like you could just type in what's been on your mind and press enter. It's your mom's voice, saying exactly what you need to hear." In award-winning Wong's unfiltered memoir, her mother is indeed the hero of her aching, angry, surprisingly funny portrait of a poet demanding, fighting, and eating her way to self-acceptance and earned recognition. Her mother enabled their survival when Wong's gambling-addicted, abusive father lost their New Jersey restaurant and then abandoned his family. In adulthood, other men nearly destroyed her, including the vicious Bad One and the ex-fiancé who pressured her to buy his mattress when they broke up. "They tell me I'm badass, a rebel, a brilliant one, and when they realize I actually am, they get mad and leave." Her literary coming-of-age is marked by racism and elision--"if anything, much of my formal education pushed me away from the roots of poetry"--but she persists. "I became a poet from my mother, from her own powers of lyrical divination." Long live Wongmom.com.

In this delightful memoir in essays, Chinese American poet Wong (How to Not Be Afraid of Everything) reflects on her experiences growing up on the Jersey Shore as the child of immigrants and later life as an English professor. In the title piece, Wong uses the image of a bank of Chinese tourist buses wending its way toward Atlantic City to set the stage for her family life: Wong's parents operated a Chinese restaurant on the Shore, whose operations were eventually hampered by her father's gambling addiction and alcoholism. The hilarious "Give Us Our Crowns" sees Wong's mother entering Wong in Miss Preteen New Jersey, giving the author the opportunity to ruminate on the impact of Western beauty ideals on Chinese women. In "Bad Bildungsroman with Table Tennis," Wong sharply recounts her father's obsessions with Ping-Pong, including his purchase of an expensive table despite the family's financial struggles, nimbly balancing humor and heartbreak. Wong cannily addresses racism in academia and the long arc of finding her identity as a poet in several essays, most notably in the final piece, "Astonished Enough?" in which she traces the personal and historical barriers that have stood between her and a writing career. With a poet's ear for language and a satirist's eye for human foibles, Wong masterfully marries her personal story with larger questions about Chinese American identity. This is a winner. (May)

A poet's memoir about her working-class childhood, writing career, family, and Asian American identity. Despite the fact that Wong's father gambled away the family's Chinese restaurant in New Jersey when she was still quite young, the feeling of being a "restaurant baby" is central to this book. "I am that person who thinks that the compost bin is beautiful, in all its swirls of color (jade mold, chocolate slime--why is no one hiring me to name nail polish?), surprising texture, and piquant death," she writes. After her father lost the restaurant and left the family, her mother became a postal worker, sorting mail overnight into and through the pandemic. If there is a single topic that unifies the book, it's her mother. A series of passages labeled "wongmom.com" imagines that her mother's wisdom might be available online, including things like her take on an "ancient Chinese saying"--"If you can't crawl, swim. If you can't swim, then take the bus." Wong's sharp sense of humor is fueled by a healthy dose of righteous anger, and her lyric energy bursts from almost every sentence. In the chapter titled "Bad Bildungsroman With Table Tennis," she writes, "Part of being a teenager is the desire to destroy something. To break something apart so fully, you can see its pulled seams, its tangled organs. At 13, I felt this feeling churn within me, this rage, this pim-ple-popping lusciousness of rudeness, this gleaming desire for sudden destruction." She writes candidly about her shoplifting phase, her misery at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and her disgust for bigotry and cultural appropriation. A good portion of the book focuses on finding her confidence as an Asian American poet, including the glorious moment when she was recognized with a big grant and a museum show. For this profoundly unsqueamish writer, poetry is "interior slime spicy along our tongues" and "chicken grease congealing behind my ear." A generous, steaming stew of a book loaded with personality and originality and sprinkled with the fiery chili of rage. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

MEET ME TONIGHT IN ATLANTIC CITY Let's begin here: on the ground. Or rather on the slabs of wood above the ground. In July, 1854, a New Jersey tourist train from Camden made its inaugural voyage to Atlantic City. Tourists came to stick their toes in the Atlantic Ocean--steel blue, the color of whales they'd never see. They came to lean against each other in the high dunes and make promises they couldn't keep. They let the wind lift those promises up, caught in the chandeliers of expensive hotels or the beaks of passing seagulls. The women who came held frilled umbrellas--jellyfish along the shore. And when they returned to their jobs and errands and thumb-sucking babies, they carried sand with them, making the train car a beach in and of itself. Glitter of the sea. This is how the boardwalk came to be: a frustrated railroad conductor and simply too much sand for his own sweeping sanity. On June 16, 1870, boards were erected, 10 feet wide and 12 feet long. Just to be clear: this is not our story. Not yet. Our story moves across that steel-blue fantasy, onto another continent, toward a place where there is no such thing as "vacation." My ancestors will stare at that word, ??, as if it were a cloud that could disappear at any point. On this continent, there are herds of oxen and lily pads the size of promises that can't be made. As a small child, I dreamt of this story. Of an ox and my mother riding its back, the hair on its hide so coarse, it makes your throat hurt. Our story, our history, is a different Atlantic City. It is 1988 and my mother is still dreaming in Toisanese--not a single word of English worms its way through her open-mouth sleep world. My little brother, Steven, had just been born, howling like a wolf who knew he was a boy. Four years earlier, when the nurses placed me in my mother's arms, I stared at her silently. She held me up to the fluorescent hospital light and declared: "I'm afraid. She knows too much." By 1988, my father had been holding illegal mahjong gambling circles for five years, often in the basement. Cigarette smoke escaped like doves from underneath the floorboards. And the shuffling. The shuffling sound of mahjong tiles, a porcelain earthquake. I learned later that some of these tiles used to be made out of bone or bamboo. Now: Bakelite, plastic. My father always invited the same people to play with him: the Chicken Bone Man, City Uncle, and Balding Uncle. His friends always played with toothpicks dangling out of their mouths, moving the sticks from side to side in concentration. My brother and I named the crew the Toothpick Gang. Just to be clear again: our story is not about small enterprises. Our story goes beyond the small batons of $20 bills passed around the mahjong table. Beyond the table's green felt, stained with cheap Tsingtao and sky-high piles of gnawed bones from the Chicken Bone Man's self-evident pastime. Our story is Atlantic City. We are talking about the Taj Mahal, Caesars, Bally's. Casinos depicting worlds my father simply couldn't fathom. At Caesars, there were towering white columns so extravagant they held up nothing at all. There were white statues of horses braying, a ceiling painted like the sky with white clouds, the busts of white people we assumed were famous but were really just white. My parents didn't even know where Rome was on a map or that Rome existed. But Caesars was gleaming in its whiteness. Who could say no to the patina of wealth? This is how we arrived: on that Chinese tourist bus where you have to fan yourself with your $10 gambling voucher and put your cigarette out in a Dixie cup. Or, if you hit it big like we once did, you can arrive in the dolphin-colored leather of your BMW, before you inevitably crash it into the Garden State Parkway median. No air-conditioning and the windows down, to save on gas mileage, of course. We arrived over a century later on a boardwalk full of non-white faces. Shoulder pads, pinstriped suits, and an amalgamation of languages punctuating the salty air. The poor, the working class, the hopeful in red-tag sequin dresses from Marshalls. Here we are! Yes, here, with self-serve wine and crab legs at the Palace Court Buffet--all of which we marveled at, but never touched. Excerpted from Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.