Chai's ( My Lucky Face) parents never believed themselves to be unusual. Her father, a young scholar new to California, fell in love with her mother, a local painter, on first sight.
That he was the son of educated Chinese immigrants and she was the daughter of Irish Catholics was immaterial-until, after spending time on both coasts, they landed in rural South Dakota.Once the locals started harassing them (e.g., trespassing on the family farm, killing pets and seeking to attack Chai's younger brother), the Chais realized that they weren't ordinary Americans after all. Easily labeled a coming-of-age story or a narrative about racial tensions in 1960s America, this memoir--whose title employs the Hawaiian word for mixed--is truly an homage to a loving marriage. Only the strongest kind of love could survive the crucible of a community hoping for a family's failure. Highly recommended for all libraries with large memoir and Asian collections. -- Library Journal.
Throughout Hapa Girl, Chai's mother proves
an impressive heroine.
Always her family's champion, she carves out a "place in our town:" she
forms her own "Irish gang," throws exotic Hawaiian luaus, and
eventually helps a young man named Tom Daschle get elected to the U.S.
Senate. Chai herself adroitly balances her worst memories. . .with her
family's triumphs. -- Terry Hong, the Christian Science
Monitor. Christian Science link
The writing is vigorous, and Chai's descriptions
of the murderous
winters and corrosive boredom of the Great Plains are compelling. . . .
Hapa Girl is a reminder that Americans cannot have too many reminders
of the un-American things they do when they're afraid. -- Don
Morrison,
Time Magazine, Asia edition. Time
Magazine link Time Review PDF Download
"A tour-de-force sojourn into a never-before-told zone of small town American bigotry. Hapa Girl is consistently stylish, permanently courageous, bitingly tragic, but always rationally detached with a Marx Brothers' wit. This is May-lee Chai's best comment yet about America." -- Anthony B. Chan, author of Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong
"I was captivated by May-lee Chai's Hapa Girl from the first sentence.
It continued to be so powerful that I read it in one sitting. It's at once
brutal and sad, humorous and plucky. Chai has beautifully captured the
deep racism and bigotry that lurks in our country with how one misguided
decision can change a family's fortunes forever. Hapa
Girl made me think about the bonds of family and the vicissitudes of place
long after I finished the last page."
-- Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and The Secret Fan
Temple University Press, ISBN: 13:978-1-59213-615-5
www.temple.edu/tempress
Hapa Girl (Temple University Press 978-1-59213-615-5) (based on the
Hawaiian term hapa-haole, meaning half-foreign) documents May-lee
Chai’s rise above a childhood of racist targeting in provincial South
Dakota. This memoirist of Chinese-American and Irish-American heritage
was nominated for a National Book Award for The Girl From Purple
Mountain, co-written with her father, Winberg Chai.
Although constantly harassed, the family resolutely avoided discussing
ethnicity. The initial stares and slurs are weathered with a nervous
humor, but “[a]fter men started driving by our house to shoot, after
our dogs were killed, it wasn’t funny at all,” the author writes.
Chai’s observations of race-based friction include the nearly
monolithic prejudice of Dakota whites against Indians, exacerbated by
the AIM / FBI showdown at Pine Ridge and lawsuits over ownership of the
Black Hills. She proposes that denominational identity is what
subdivides the locals—Lutherans versus Catholics, and so on. In hopes
of achieving parity, her tenacious mother Carolyn pulls together a
small “Irish gang.” A visit to China during the student unrest
of the
late eighties clarifies how widespread xenophobia is; it ends Chai’s
self-blame and frees her to move forward.
