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How to pronounce Fae Myenne Ng: "Myenne" is a single syllable. "Ng" is pronounced "ing."
Fae Myenne Ng is a first-generation Chinese American author, born December 2, 1956 in San Francisco. She attended the University of California-Berkeley, and received her M.F.A. at Columbia University.
Ng is the author of bestseller and PEN/Faulkner Fiction finalist Bone and American Book Award winner Steer Toward Rock. Her work has been published in Harper's Magazine, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and anthologized in Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, Literature Across Cultures, The PEN Short Fiction Project, and The Pushcart Prize. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Guggenheim, the Lannan Foundation, the NEA, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She teaches creative writing and literature in UC Berkeley's Department of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies.
Fae Myenne Ng's website
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What motivated you to write this memoir?
This is the book I always hoped to write. Orphan Bachelors is about the almost-vainglorious era in my San Francisco's Chinatown, a sliver of time when my parents and their community held on tenaciously to the pre-Mao culture they knew, much like how the Sicilians in Manhattan's Little Italy preserved the world of pre-Mussolini Italy.
Tell us how the Chinese Exclusion Act and US immigration policies directly impacted your immediate family and your Chinatown community?
Families were rare in the Chinatown of my youth, making it an intimate, insular village. Despite Exclusion being repealed in 1943, for over two decades, a quota limited the annual entry of Chinese to 105 persons. My father called it "the Little Exclusion".
In 1940, my father's sister, the wife of a merchant, was already in America and paid $4,000 (today's equivalent of $82,000) for citizenship papers that allowed him to enter the country. He was one of the last and youngest detainees on Angel Island in its final year of operation. There, he was interrogated; he'd memorized a book of lies to pose as the son of an American citizen. After several mishaps, he passed the interrogation. He lived in San Francisco as an ...
Danielle Geller is a writer of personal essays and memoir. She received her MFA in creative writing for nonfiction at the University of Arizona, and a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award in 2016. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Orphan Bachelors
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Sabrina Imbler is a writer and science journalist living in Brooklyn. Their first chapbook, Dyke (geology) was published by Black Lawrence Press. They have received fellowships and scholarships from the Asian American Writers... (more)
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Orphan Bachelors
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How Far the Light Reaches
by Sabrina Imbler
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