Host Deepa Fernandes speaks with National Book Award finalist Lisa Ko about her new novel “Memory Piece,” which follows three Asian American women through the 1980s, late 1990 and 2040 and explores how their lives intersect and change.
Book excerpt: ‘Memory Piece’
By Lisa Ko
Before the raids, before the hidden compartments and career retrospectives, there was a lonely girl in her room. A lonely girl in a vast cocoon of a bedroom with her own computer, privacy unquestioned.
A lonely girl in a busy suburb, brother’s weights dropping across the hall, mother scolding her for spending too much time in her notebooks. A lonely girl in an apartment shared with sisters, and then alone. Secret journal entries, pilfered booze, furtive masturbation.
They were born in the same year, their families part of a network of Hong Kong Chinese and Taiwanese and Malaysian Chinese and Chinese Filipinos around New York, differences flattened by proximity of exile. Some families stayed in the city, while others, like Giselle Chin’s, flighted to the suburbs, existing in an alternate reality of holidays and weekends, Thanks-giving turkeys with sticky rice, Chinese New Year parties with parents blotto and maudlin as they sang along to Teresa Teng, after which Giselle would fall asleep in the back seat of her family’s Chevy wood wagon on the ride back to Jersey. On Saturday mornings Giselle and her brother Alexander went to Chinese school in a Hackensack church basement with the other jook‑sing kids and one white dad who had a Chinese wife and kid, where they learned how to count in Mandarin and replicate Xeroxes of brush paintings with ink.
The Weis’ Fourth of July barbecue was supposed to be a summer re-union for the Chinese school students and their families. Larry Wei, a year younger than Giselle, made his presence known as she circled a table of potato chips and onion dip. “Guess what,” he said, mouth full. “I made a sandwich out of chips with chips inside.”
She considered…
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