From Publishers Weekly
When we first meet Kai Ting, the seven-year-old hero of this compelling, autobiographical first novel, he has just been ground into the pavement by the neighborhood bully--the most recent incident in a long series of calamities. Kai Ting is the youngest child but the only son of high-born Chinese parents who, before his birth, fled China's Communist revolution, leaving their wealth behind. Kai Ting was born in the San Francisco ghetto where his family had relocated in the mid-1940s. Survival in this urban jungle is made all the more difficult for him by severely impaired eyesight and "a body that made Tinker Bell look ruthless." His mother, once his sole refuge from the ruffians on the street, has died of cancer, and his father has married a WASP who cannot abide anything Chinese--especially her husband's children. Their father turns a blind eye as his wife locks the children out of the house during the day; Kai Ting's return at night with bruises and torn clothes becomes an excuse for a second beating, this time at home. Redemption does come, after a fashion, but it is hard-fought and painfully won. This is the Chinese-American experience as Dickens might have described it, peopled by many rogues and a few saints. Lee's characters--blacks, Hispanics, whites and Asians--tend to extremes of good and evil, but, vividly drawn and intensely human, they are never stereotypes. His story is a primer on how to keep body and soul together in a world that is as gritty as the streets of his hero's neighborhood and seems often dangerously out of control. 50,000 first printing; Literary Guild selection; author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The story of Kai Ting's coming of age in the San Francisco slums could be the story of any sensitive young boy struggling to overcome the bullies on the mean streets of a big city. Change the Chinese to Yiddish or Italian and the tale would be the same. Brutalized by a stepmother determined to expunge all traces of his Chi nese mother from the home, Kai finds himself the punching bag for every bully in the neighborhood. His salvation is the YMCA; his mentors, a group of retired boxers. While this is less a masculine Joy Luck Club than a Chinese Prince of Cen tral Park (by Evan H. Rhodes, Coward, 1975. o.p.), China Boy resonates with strong characterizations, evocative descriptions of San Francisco in the 1950s, and the righteous indignation of abused innocence. For most fiction collections. Literary Guild selection.
- Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
