Review: Beyond the Narrow Gate

This book is the story of the author's mother and three of her classmates. Leslie Chang's mother and her family fled to Taiwan during the Cultural Revolution. There she attended Taipei's most elite girls' school. These schoolgirls dreamed of winning scholarships to study in the United States. Four of them managed to do so, but found that life in the United States was not what they had hoped. Marginal colleges were more like finishing schools than serious universities, and none of the women were ever particularly comfortable in their lives in the United States.

Normally I enjoy this sort of book, but I found this one lacking. I felt like the author had difficulty treating her mother as objectively as her other subjects. I found the writing to be, for lack of a better term, tiresome. The author regularly puts thoughts into the heads of her subjects. The book is long-winded, and the chapters seem to ramble on without organization. Some more serious editing might have made this book better. In any case, there are much better books about the immigrant experience and about Asian-American identity.

Leslie Chang, Beyond the Narrow Gate: The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America (Plume, 2000) ISBN: 0452277612 

Review: Unless

This book is the story of a mother's despair when she discovers her daughter has chosen to leave her comfortable, suburban existence and live on the street. Reta Winters is devastated to discover that her daughter Norah is spending her days on a Toronto street corner holding a sign that says "goodness." Her nights are spent in a shelter. Unless enters the interior world of a mother. We learn all of Reta's thoughts; what we learn very little of is Norah herself. Norah is arguably the most interesting character in the book. Instead we get Reta, reminiscing and thinking about all of the elements of her life, her marriage, and her children. Reta has spent her professional life translating the works of French feminist philosopher Danielle Westerman, and writing a chick lit novel of her own. We hear quite a bit about both the novel (which has a sequel in progress) and Westerman. This is far too much for a fictional philosopher whose contribution is never all that well explained, and novels are not especially interesting. Ultimately, Shields never really made me care about any of the characters except Norah, of whom I consistently wanted to hear more. This is one of those book where I suspect there are deeper things going on with the writing, but I simply couldn't engage enough to really investigate them.

Carol Shields, Unless (Random House Canada, 2003) ISBN: 0679311807