Best Selling Books by Judy Fong Bates

In the tradition of The Concubine''s Children and Paper Shadows, a probing memoir from the author of the acclaimed novel Midnight at the Dragon Cafe. An elegant and surprising book about a Chinese family''s difficult arrival in Canada, and a daughter''s search to understand remarkable and terrible truths about her parents'' past lives. Growing up in her father''s hand laundry in small town Ontario, Judy Fong Bates listened to stories of her parents'' past lives in China, a place far removed from their every-day life of poverty and misery. But in spite of the allure of these stories, Fong Bates longed to be a Canadian girl. Fifty years later she finally followed her curiosity back to her ancestral home in China for a reunion that spiralled into a series of unanticipated discoveries. Opening with a shock as moving as the one that powers The Glass Castle, The Year of Finding Memory explores a particular, yet universal, world of family secrets, love, loss, courage and shame. This is a memoir of a daughter''s emotional journey, and her painful acceptance of conflicting truths. In telling the story of her parents, Fong Bates is telling the story of how she came to know them, of finding memory.

Set in the 1960s, Judy Fong Bates’s much-talked-about debut novel is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a small Ontario town’s solitary Chinese family, whose life is changed over the course of one summer when she learns the burden of secrets. Through Su-Jen’s eyes, the hard life behind the scenes at the Dragon Café unfolds. As Su-Jen’s father works continually for a better future, her mother, a beautiful but embittered woman, settles uneasily into their new life. Su-Jen feels the weight of her mother’s unhappiness as Su-Jen’s life takes her outside the restaurant and far from the customs of the traditional past. When Su-Jen’s half-brother arrives, smouldering under the responsibilities he must bear as the dutiful Chinese son, he forms an alliance with Su-Jen’s mother, one that will have devastating consequences. Written in spare, intimate prose, Midnight at the Dragon Café is a vivid portrait of a childhood divided by two cultures and touched by unfulfilled longings and unspoken secrets.

A chorus of immigrant voices populates Judy Fong Bates''s graceful and poignant first collection. Denizens of the ubiquitous small towns around Ontario, as far from their native land as can be imagined yet united by their proximity to the local Chinese laundry, her characters have in common their driving desire to assimilate, to fit in, to belong to a "majority" culture. But they are also people trapped by a certain cultural pride in confronting a world that may feign acceptance while at the same time reminding them that they are "other." In the words of the Toronto Globe and Mail, Judy Fong Bates''s "deceptively simple narratives expose the hopes and hardships that define her characters'' lives." Her graceful writing is full of compassion, insight, and honesty; it opens our eyes to the commonality of what it is to be human.

Su-Jen Chou, a Chinese immigrant growing up in 1950s Ontario, finds herself shouldering the weight of her mother''s hopes and dreams as her isolated family attempts to forge a life for themselves in a small town.