Publishers Weekly
05/15/2023
University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire English professor Shih presents a raw, moving debut memoir about his complicated relationship with his father and his Asian American identity. Shih, whose family moved to the U.S. from Hong Kong in 1971, lost his father, a traveling salesman, in 2019. Though he knew his father was gravely ill, Shih didn’t travel to Texas to see him before he died. Though he acknowledges that the “easy answer, which is not entirely inaccurate, is that I was self-absorbed and uncaring,” Shih sifts through his past and links his delay to other, more complicated causes, loosely organized into the “eight arguments” of the title. His status as an immigrant who left China when he was just one year old created tensions between his twin ethnic identities; Shih writes that he “mastered English at the expense of Chinese, and not only stopped needing my parents’ guidance in grade school but actively began to distrust it.” Elsewhere, he reflects on episodes of racial violence aimed at Chinese Americans that have occurred in his lifetime and the notion that Asians have unfair advantages in accessing higher education (which he disputes). It amounts to a thoughtful meditation on the gap between the promise the American dream dangles in front of minorities and the realities of their discriminatory treatment. Agent: Laura Usselman, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (Aug.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misnamed the author's academic institution.
From the Publisher
Praise for Chinese Prodigal:
A Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch of Fall 2023
“David Shih’s new memoir is a searing commentary on race in America, especially what it means to be Asian American in a country that is often seen as a neat division of black and white cultures . . . [Chinese Prodigal is] provocative and brave in asking tough questions of himself and his readers.”—Volume One
“An insightful window into the complicated, difficult relationship between Asian Americans and the place they call home . . . a powerful and touching account of maintaining empathy and filiality in the face of political, cultural, and generational differences.”—Collin Chung, International Examiner
"A profoundly thoughtful, unflinchingly honest Asian American memoir . . . Throughout this memorable book, Shih is adept at seamlessly weaving historical events into his life story, forging thoughtful, creative connections between his evolution and that of the U.S. The result is an insightful, vulnerable, trenchant, and utterly readable story about belonging that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt that one or more of their identities sets them apart.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Chinese Prodigal carefully prizes apart the layers of the familiar narratives to find what lies beneath them. This wide-ranging memoir explores the shifting contours of Asian American identity over the centuries and in the author’s own life . . . An insightful, expansive American story, and it reminds readers that our lives are never far removed from the workings of history.”—Jenny Hamilton, Booklist
“Chinese Prodigal is a text that challenges its own readers to critically engage with the arguments it puts forward, to reevaluate the preconceptions with which we approach the narratives we consume.”—AsAmNews
“A raw, moving debut memoir . . . [Chinese Prodigal] amounts to a thoughtful meditation on the gap between the promise the American dream dangles in front of minorities and the realities of their discriminatory treatment.”—Publishers Weekly
“Shih’s prose, in its beauty, invited me to stay with it, to keep turning the pages . . . I’m not sure if I’ll ever truly be finished with this book. I hadn’t expected to see myself reflected in Chinese Prodigal, and now that I have, I feel electrified, wondering where I’m supposed to go from here, knowing that wherever that is, the path won’t be easy.”—Jasmine Gonzalez, Porchlight
“Enlivened by a fearless intellect, candid personal reckonings, and its moving song of a wounded citizen heart, Chinese Prodigal is as provocative and illuminating as any recent memoir on what it has meant—and means to be—an Asian in America. This is essential reading for anyone keen to understand the unique narratives—both public and private—of the Asian American experience.”—Chang-rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad
“In Chinese Prodigal, David Shih takes us into the intimate relationships within a Chinese American family and explodes out into the world of Asian Americans. This is a meticulous work of reflection, of research, of the intersections between the construction of race and racism in this country. It is an urgent warning that demands a slow reading, an honest quest to bring into light the many hands that hold us back as we grapple with ourselves and each other in a history that is fraught with our invisibility, our malleability, our complicated compliance. Chinese Prodigal is a defiant incantation for those who have brought us here and those we have brought.”—Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Song Poet
“Chinese Prodigal is an intellectually heady exploration of race matters, a deep consideration of the cultural fluidities, mythologizing, and disruption attendant on Asian American identity. Shih recounts the fitful evolution of his own consciousness and an adult life spurred to probe into matters of descent, diaspora, and exilic identity in his own family—Chinese immigrants resettled in Texas, far-flung from ethnic and national roots. A moving autobiography embedded within a seven-story mountain of a journey; compelling, insightful, probing, and emotionally balanced.”—Garrett Hongo, author of The Perfect Sound
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-04-17
A Chinese American English professor reflects on how race has shaped his life.
When Shih was growing up, he never identified as Asian American, a racial moniker forged in the crucible of political struggle that felt illegible to young people like him, who couldn’t imagine a pan-Asian identity. “I grew up in the seventies and eighties,” he writes, “a time when the significance of Asian-ness was still being hashed out.” As he grew, though, experiences like the birth of his biracial son, his appointment to the English department of a predominantly White university, and the murder of a Black man, Akai Gurley, at the hands of an Asian American cop changed the way he viewed his place in America’s complex racial geography. It was an evolution his immigrant parents did not always share. “Back then,” he writes, “I couldn’t explain [to my parents] how our rights had been fought for by the Black Americans they didn’t know and not gifted to them by the white Americans they did.” Eventually, Shih came to understand himself as an Asian American who troubled the model-minority myth by losing an engineering scholarship and unexpectedly gaining an affirmative action–based fellowship to graduate school for English several years later. He also began to make sense of his parents who, he writes, ultimately supported his stereotype-defying decisions as well as his White wife and future in-laws, relationships he situates within the context of the Supreme Court decision allowing interracial marriage. Throughout this memorable book, Shih is adept at seamlessly weaving historical events into his life story, forging thoughtful, creative connections between his evolution and that of the U.S. The result is an insightful, vulnerable, trenchant, and utterly readable story about belonging that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt that one or more of their identities sets them apart.
A profoundly thoughtful, unflinchingly honest Asian American memoir.
