Chinese prodigal A memoir in eight arguments

David Shih, 1970-

Book - 2023

"From an exciting and sharp-voiced new observer of American culture, a forthright and probing debut exploring Asian American identity in a racially codified country. After his father's passing in 2019, David Shih sought to unravel the underlying tensions that defined the complex relationship between him and his parents--a question that ultimately forced a reckoning with the expectations he encountered as the only son of Chinese immigrants and the realities of what it means to be Asian in a segregated country. Chinese Prodigal is a candid examination of a society and the people it has never made space for. In public life and in Shih's own, "Asian Americanness" has changed shape constantly, directed by the needs of th...e country's racial imaginary. A sliding scale, visibility for Asians in America has always been relative, something that only comes into focus when it aligns with broader political agendas. Structured as a memoir in essays, Chinese Prodigal examines the emergence of "Asian American" in a post-Civil Rights America, from the moment the concept took political hold with the construction of the model minority myth, then galvanizing in the wake of the death of Vincent Chin in 1980s Detroit, and on through the vexed place of Asians and Asian Americans in the right-wing effort to dismantle affirmative action and remake public education. Present in the food we eat, the jobs we take, and the ways we parent, the process of becoming an American is defined by who and what you must sacrifice to survive and excel. A work of rare subtlety, Chinese Prodigal offers a new vocabulary for understanding a racial hierarchy too often conceptualized as binary. It is a moving testimony of a son, father, and citizen stepping outside the expectations imposed on him"--

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Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Published
New York : Atlantic Monthly Press 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
David Shih, 1970- (author)
Edition
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition
Physical Description
x, 292 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780802158994
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1. Chinese Prodigal
  • Chapter 2. The Book of Genesis
  • Chapter 3. It's Not Fair
  • Chapter 4. Affirmative Action Hire
  • Chapter 5. Loving Story
  • Chapter 6. Madame Chu's
  • Chapter 7. Paper Son
  • Chapter 8. Eleven and a Half Pounds
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Booklist Review

The outline of writer and professor David Shih's family story is perhaps familiar: his parents left China for America, bought a house, and opened a wholesaling business; he excelled in school, lost his Chinese, and married a white partner. In the aftermath of his father's death, however, Shih found himself trying to understand the vast landscape of laws, expectations, prejudices, and social forces that created his family's "classic immigrant story." Chinese Prodigal carefully prises apart the layers of the familiar narratives to find what lies beneath them. This wide-ranging memoir explores the shifting contours of Asian American identity over the centuries and in the author's own life, from the 1982 killing of Vincent Chin to the concept of affirmative action to the longtime popularity of (and racist stereotypes about) Chinese restaurants in America. Shih is generous to his family and fellow Asian Americans, though often unstinting in his perspective on himself. Chinese Prodigal is an insightful, expansive American story, and it reminds readers that our lives are never far removed from the workings of history.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire English professor Shih presents a raw, moving debut memoir about his complicated relationship with his father and his Asian American identity. Shih, whose family moved to the U.S. from Hong Kong in 1971, lost his father, a traveling salesman, in 2019. Though he knew his father was gravely ill, Shih didn't travel to Texas to see him before he died. Though he acknowledges that the "easy answer, which is not entirely inaccurate, is that I was self-absorbed and uncaring," Shih sifts through his past and links his delay to other, more complicated causes, loosely organized into the "eight arguments" of the title. His status as an immigrant who left China when he was just one year old created tensions between his twin ethnic identities; Shih writes that he "mastered English at the expense of Chinese, and not only stopped needing my parents' guidance in grade school but actively began to distrust it." Elsewhere, he reflects on episodes of racial violence aimed at Chinese Americans that have occurred in his lifetime and the notion that Asians have unfair advantages in accessing higher education (which he disputes). It amounts to a thoughtful meditation on the gap between the promise the American dream dangles in front of minorities and the realities of their discriminatory treatment. Agent: Laura Usselman, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (Aug.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misnamed the author's academic institution.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A Chinese American English professor reflects on how race has shaped his life. When Shih was growing up, he never identified as Asian American, a racial moniker forged in the crucible of political struggle that felt illegible to young people like him, who couldn't imagine a pan-Asian identity. "I grew up in the seventies and eighties," he writes, "a time when the significance of Asian-ness was still being hashed out." As he grew, though, experiences like the birth of his biracial son, his appointment to the English department of a predominantly White university, and the murder of a Black man, Akai Gurley, at the hands of an Asian American cop changed the way he viewed his place in America's complex racial geography. It was an evolution his immigrant parents did not always share. "Back then," he writes, "I couldn't explain [to my parents] how our rights had been fought for by the Black Americans they didn't know and not gifted to them by the white Americans they did." Eventually, Shih came to understand himself as an Asian American who troubled the model-minority myth by losing an engineering scholarship and unexpectedly gaining an affirmative action--based fellowship to graduate school for English several years later. He also began to make sense of his parents who, he writes, ultimately supported his stereotype-defying decisions as well as his White wife and future in-laws, relationships he situates within the context of the Supreme Court decision allowing interracial marriage. Throughout this memorable book, Shih is adept at seamlessly weaving historical events into his life story, forging thoughtful, creative connections between his evolution and that of the U.S. The result is an insightful, vulnerable, trenchant, and utterly readable story about belonging that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt that one or more of their identities sets them apart. A profoundly thoughtful, unflinchingly honest Asian American memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.