“Filled with lush detail and crafted with the narrative vision of a novel,  Evelina Chao's memoir is a passionate and poignant tale of family, history, healing, and reconciliation.  Chao's graceful voice vivifies this story of a daughter's relationship with her mother and family, in both America and China.  Yeh Yeh's House eloquently speaks to the responsibility and need so many of us feel to discover one's self in the context of both history and familial love.  For all of us who have had to assimilate and balance dreams with expectations, this journey of self-reckoning will serve as a gratifying inspiration.”   Terence Cheng, author of Sons of Heaven

 

“As a girl in Virginia in the 1950s, Chao corresponded with her grandfather, Yeh Yeh, a renowned poet and professor of English living in Beijing.  He wrote, “You must always be yourself.”  But who was she?  An American or the descendent of the distinguished Chinese family from which she inherited her artistic gifts?  A viola player in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Chao didn' t visit her relatives in China until 1987, making the pilgrimage with her often uncommunicative mother. Writing with striking directness and lucidity, Chao chronicles both unexpectedly arduous adventures and life-altering revelations.  Keenly aware of the contradictions at work in this brutal and beautiful land, she exquisitely articulates the hard-won wisdom and the complex emotions inherent in the difficult lives of her kind and resilient relatives, many of whom suffered horrifically during the Cultueral Revolution.  Chao also discovers her mother' s true self and experiences a sense of belonging she has never felt before.  Utterly unaffected yet profoundly affecting, Chaos' resplendent tale of unbreakable family ties incisively illuminates the deep meaning of inheritance.”.......Donna Seaman, Booklist

 

In 1987 Evelina Chao, a violist for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, headed for China with her mother on a long-delayed visit to her family.  There had always been an excuse not to go—concerts, orchestra gigs----and, as a result, she never had a chance to see her paternal grandfather, Yeh Yeh, before he died.  “Yeh Yeh's House” chronicles her five-week trek through the country, where she filled out her family's story.
    We've become so overwhelmed in recent years with over-earnest, mediocre memoirs----all that “getting in touch” with oneself, so much “making peace with the past”----that it's easy to think that you know how Chao's story plays out without reading a page.  But “Yeh Yeh's House” is a pleasant surprise----a carefully crafted, tough-minded memoir that has little patience for the usual cliches.
    The book is in fact many memoirs: a seriocomic recollection of Chao's family's struggles to assimilate into the American mainstream, a chronicle of Mao's brutal Cultural Revolution in the 60's and 70's, and a snapshot of China in the politically tense years just before Tiananmen Square.  Some of its strongest passages are food writing, capturing Chao's gape-jawed travels through the various eating habits of Shanghai, Beijing and China's heartland----from turtle soup to fish served while still flopping.  (Chao's mother explains: “Your fish still very frisky, so you see, chef here is very good!”)
    Those are funny moments, but they underscore the difficulty Chao has penetrating her family's past and pace of life.  She doesn't understand why the tone of Yeh Yeh's letters is so desperate—“Come see me soon, before it is too late, for I am failing,” he writes in his last letter—and much of her experiences with her older family members are deeply steeped in passive-aggressive behavior.  One aunt, an academic obsessed with Twain and Whitman, stays with Chao and her husband in St. Paul, where she's amused and fascinated by American life in general and Pillsbury crescent rolls in particular.  But her thank-you note is slyly vicious: “My translation of ‘Leaves of Grass' is finally out.  I would send you a copy, but there is no point since you don't read Chinese.

     In China, Chao is immediately pegged as weiguoren (a foreigner), but her trip does shed light on her family's headstrong, austere attitudes----and to an extent, China's.  Yeh Yeh, she learns, was publicly humiliated during the Cultural Revolution: When he was 80 years old, police officers “spat on him, made him get down on his knees and recant for his study of Western theology.”  Chao becomes frustrated with the backwardness of the country, manifested in some white-knuckle flights in rattletrap planes and her struggle to find the connections (and cartons of Marlboros) that will dislodge tickets to Beijing.
    The larger picture is even more troubling: On a boat trip down the Yangtze River she tells of stumbling into the ship's sickeningly crowded and noisy lower hold, where hundreds of poor people are packed together—exposing “the stupendous lie” of the government's claims of equality and fair treatment.
    Chao's clinical yet compassionate style only rarely gives way to goopy memoir-speak: Writing about the Yangtze, she recalls, “All I had to do was to feel the river's pulse in order to realize how one generation flowed into the next, and that we were conjoined as surely as currents in the water.”  But she's attuned to the complex moments that define both her trip and her heritage, from the threat of Yeh Yeh's house being destroyed in a fast-growing Beijing to the sadness of an actress who resents the restrictions placed on her art.
    “They don't tolerate anything smelling of individual will,” Chao is told, and her book poignantly captures the frustrations of such constricted living.  It also elegantly captures the moments of individuality, all across China, that still manage to break through.    Mark Athitakis, editor of the Chicago Reader who also reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Post and New York Times.

 

“...honest and touching..”Yeh Yeh's House is a lovely and generous memoir....Chao's book will help Caucasians understand the feelings of otherness among people who don't look like us and the ways in which American-born children of immigrants must integrate the skeins of their backgrounds.  It will resonate with anyone who has felt emotionally lost in a foreign country.  And Chao's beautiful writing will delight you.”  Mary Ann Grossman,  St. Paul Pioneer Press

 

“... ..a vivid family history, a strikingly lucid memoir of one woman's awakening to her heritage and an incisive portrait of China as a “land of irony and convoluted fate....Chao is a splendidly direct and captivating storyteller...”  Speakeasy Magazine

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And about GATES OF GRACE:

“Marvelous....compelling...Evelina Chao involves the reader in the lives of her characters.  She sets scenes so well that we can feel the steam and hear the wok's sizzle....a good story.”
                                       Minneapolis Star and Tribune

“Deeply moving....well-told, well paced and written with style and grace....lively in content and vivid in description....a fine book.”
    St. Paul Pioneer Press

“Chao's obervations about the Chinese immigrant experience are acutely drawn, and she writes gracefully and with full command of the details that bring a story to life.”
                                       Los Angeles Times

“A vivid blend of realism, intrigue, and romance.”
                                       Booklist
                         
                                     
“A remarkable novel.”
              Houston Chronicle 

“Vividly portrayed...the struggles of a Chinese woman...the story of a widow...the story of every family!”
              Columbus Dispatch

“Gates of Grace reveals the very hearts and sinews of the Chinese community in America—their closed loyalties, rooted traditions, bitter enemies which, carried intact from the homeland by the older generation, mold the lives of the younger more profoundly than they fully understand....It is the story of one brave Chinese woman who experiences much violence, upheaval and drudgery in her early life, yet battles toward happiness.”
             Pat Barr, author of Jade

 

Book Reviews: The Forbidden Stitch, Hurricane Alice, 1987, Indivisible By Four, by Arnold Steinhart, January 31, 1999, Star Tribune An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth, May 19, 1999, Star Tribune, Who Am I? by Yi-Fu Tuan, November 21, 1999, Star Tribune
Pilgrim, by Timothy Findley, January 4, 2000, Star Tribune.