Yeh Yeh's House: A Memoir
by Evelina Chao
St Martin's Press $187
Thoughtful and ambitious, musician and novelist Evelina Chao's memoir takes the reader on a five-week trip to China in the 1980s and into her own emotions and consciousness as a second-generation Chinese-American. It's easy and often compulsive reading. The flowing narrative is enlivened by good dialogue in varied voices. It bursts with so much detail an index would not be out of place.
Telling what she knows of her parents' stories as well as her own, Chao narrates how, immersed in her American life as a young adult and professional musician, she resists, for years, the insistent calls of her father's family to visit them. They want her to know China, to discover her roots. She finally yields, some years after the prime mover in this campaign, her distinguished grandfather - a professor of English, poet and theologian, who has written to her in English from her childhood - has died. Initially, she sees her journey to Beijing, to visit his house and family, as seeking spiritual union with him.
Travelling with her mother, they first fly to Shanghai. But they set out just before former US president Jimmy Carter also visits China. Direct tickets to Beijing prove impossible to obtain. The circuitous and wearying route, skilfully and patiently negotiated by her mother, by which they finally reach yeh yeh's house - itself a fascinating account - takes them also on a visit to her mother's family at Changsha.