Excerpt from Orphan Bachelors by Fae Myenne Ng, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

By the time my sister and I met them, they were defeated men without descendants, as pitiful as the deformed eunuchs of the Shang dynasty. The Orphan Bachelors sat out their days in Portsmouth Square, their silence seething as their gaze grew more and more furious. Our father taught us to call each one Grandfather.

In our childhood, my sister and I heard no fairy tales, no love stories. We only heard tales of woe. Women cried; men bled. In China, everyone went crazy from unrelenting grief or committed suicide from unrequited love. Those who survived became gambling or opium addicts—or just plain mean. In China, women jumped into wells and polluted the family water; in Chinatown, they jumped off the roof of the Ping Yuen projects, so we never felt safe in the playground. In China, butchers were revered masters of the cleaver. In America, every butcher was handsome because they were among the few males who stayed to work in the ghetto.

We learned that a story's function was to protect. Like a gung fu disciple, the easy life made a lazy student, and the hard life made a grand master. Our parents didn't believe in bedtime stories. A story that lulls you into dreaming? Why waste time telling a story that didn't terrify and teach? Stories were for waking you up not putting you to sleep. Stories were forewarnings so that we didn't venture into danger. Stories were amulets to save us from committing wrongs that could cut us down or worse, make us lose face.

When our mother told us about the Japanese soldier whose bayonet found her in the tall grasses or about the thugs at the Ping projects who dragged her friend into a waiting car, we knew not to ask why or what happened next. Curiosity only got us a dozen whacks with the chicken-feather duster. Our mother was teaching us about vigilance. If she didn't offer the story's ending, it was better not to know. Asking was disobedience: children didn't need to know the whole story.

Be careful. Be safe. Stay alive. That was the only story.

Excerpted from Orphan Bachelors © 2023 Fae Myenne Ng. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.