Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother by William Poy Lee, James Lee Poy

From the Publisher

In the best-selling tradition of The Color of Water comes a beautifully written, evocative memoir of a relationship between a mother and son—and the Chinese-American experience

In The Eighth Promise, author William Poy Lee gives us a rare view of the Asian-American experience from a mother-son perspective. His moving and complex story of growing up in the housing projects of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1960s and ’70s unfolds in two voices—the author’s own and that of his mother—to provide a sense of tradition and culture. It is a stunning tale of murder, injustice, fortitude, and survival. Already, this exquisitely wrought memoir is garnering rave notices.

Hannah Tucker - Entertainment Weekly

Peppered with wit and sarcasm, this gracefully told saga forgoes melodrama. A-

Deborah Donovan - Booklist

Lee's story is part multigenerational saga and part tale of race-fueled political turmoil, fused together with a refreshingly honest portrayal of a timeless mother-son bond.

Marianne Villanueva - San Francisco Chronicle

This rich, double-stranded memoir follows a familiar narrative arc: a family comes to America from (fill in the blank). Family members encounter myriad adversities. These, however, only serve to test the family's resolve. In the end, the immigrants triumph, and readers may rest assured America has worked its wondrous assimilating magic yet again.

Publishers Weekly

While many immigrants are focused on assimilation, Lee's mother, Poy Jen Lee, came to America with a different agenda. In 1948, Poy Jen agreed to leave Suey Wan, her Toisan village in the Pearl River delta of China, to come to America as the wife of a Toisanese-American man. Before leaving, she made eight promises to her mother, among them that she'd find good husbands for her sisters and arrange immigration papers for her mother and brother; teach her children Chinese and Toisan customs, so they'd know their heritage; keep clan sisterhood strong; and cook traditional medicinal soups. The eighth promise bound Poy Jen to the fundamental Toisan ethos, "to live her life in complete compassion" for all people-her family, her Chun clan sisterhood and her larger community. In this remarkable memoir, mother and son, in alternating chapters, tell the story of their life in San Francisco's Chinatown from the 1950s to the present. Between American racism and power struggles in the Chinese community, it's a tribute to Toisan endurance that Poy Jen not only held her family together but also brought her children back to China to fortify their clan connection. Fans of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston shouldn't hesitate to embrace this formidable matriarch and the son she taught to cook her chi soups. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Attorney and architect Lee's meandering memoir about growing up in an immigrant family. First-time author Lee opens with his mother's story, charting her move from a traditional Toisanese village to San Francisco. His descriptions of his mother's early life understandably feel a bit removed, and the pace picks up when Lee turns to his own childhood and adolescence. He was born in the U.S. and, as a teenager in the late 1960s, sporadically participated in politics. At Berkeley, Lee grappled with class lines in the Asian-American community-middle-class Asians didn't invite working-class kids like him to their parties. In 1972, Lee's brother Richard was implicated in the slaying of another man. Richard was eventually convicted of first-degree murder, although Lee suspected his brother was in fact the victim of a "well-orchestrated conspiracy." The last quarter of the book recounts Lee's dogged efforts to rescue his bother. He raised funds for Richard's appeal, and even entered law school because he thought acquainting himself with the legal system might somehow help. The question of identity looms large in this plodding family narrative: What makes an American? How do Americans connect with their ancestral past? Traveling to Toisan in 1983 was the beginning of what Lee describes as "a slow reintegration of self." As a first-generation American, he had always felt "as if I had been dropped out of the sky," as if his American present and future had nothing to do with his parents' past. The trip to Toisan helped bridge the gap. Lee's prose is uninspired, and sometimes embarrassingly juvenile (a high school "Song and Yell" contest was "an orgasm of school spirit"). Throughout, the author weaveshis mother's own words, set off in italics; unfortunately, this seems gimmicky, and the constant veering from one voice to another is irksome rather than powerful. Predictable, even trite.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Reading Group Guide

Table of Contents

Reading Group Guide

CONNECTING WITH ONE’S OLD WORLD PAST AND BEING AMERICAN

TWO VOICES

1. Did you agree with the author’s choice to alternate chapters between his mother’s voice and his own? Or was it confusing?
2. Were the two voices clearly differentiable?
3. Did you notice the shift as the narrative continued, the Mother’s voice starting to shift more into observer and commentator rather than as the main character and as a teacher? In contrast, the author grows more-and-more into his own voice as his own story comes into the foreground?
4. Did the shift work as a writing device?
5. The author recorded over thirty hours of interviews with his mother -- all in original Toisanese dialect. It’s one skill to translate words, but what do you think are the writing challenges involved in conveying the personality, the speaking cadences, and the cultural reference points of Toisanese into American?
BICULTURAL AMERICANS

1. What is the connection between old-world ancestry and being an American?
2. What do we gain if we explore the connection?
3. What do we lose, if anything, if we don’t?
4. Is being American merely a matter of gaining citizenship, or do you truly become one only after several generations of your family living here?
5. Are you less an American if you reconnect with your old-world ancestry - or are you in some way, more of one? Are you less patriotic?
6. Are you more of an American if you completely assimilate and forget everything about your family’s old world culture and language? Are you more patriotic?
7. In a globalizing age, how does knowing one’s own ancestry, or retaining or relearning the language of your parents or grandparents, help you?
8. How might it hinder you?
CONTRASTING TOISAN WISDOM AND AMERICAN KNOWLEDGE

1. What did you learn about pregnancy and childbirth that is different from American conventional wisdom?
2. Do you think there is merit in the approach to soups and food, i.e., to enhance the chi body and inner fires of each family member? Or is this an old wives’ tale?
3. Can the Clan system of family take firmer root in America? Would it be a better familial model than the nuclear family model? Or is it unrealistic given the pace of our lives and the demands of our careers?
TAKING A MORAL STAND

1. In the face of official wrongdoing, corruption, or organized crime in your community, when is it right to take a personal stand?
2. When might it be foolish to take a stand?
3. Or to continue a stand?
4. Is a personal stand ever worth risking the possibility of death for?
WHO’S YOUR DADDY? OR MOMMY?

AS THE CASE MAY BE.

1. Is parental influence more powerful when it is unspoken and subtle or when it is overtly imposed by rules, rewards and punishments, and verbal repetition?
2. Which parent has had the deeper influence on your character, life outlook, and values?
3. What makes you say that? And in what ways? How did that parent influence you?
4. Would you like to interview your mother? Or father?
5. If your mother consented to be interviewed, what would you like to know?
6. How would you ask her about sensitive areas without her withdrawing into silence or vagaries?
HIGHER EDUCATION: PORQUAY?

In the book, each family member had a job: the father to provide food, roof, and clothing; the mother to take care of the home and shop; and the children to study well with the goal of winning scholarships to attend college. Each night after the evening meal, the parents ceased their own activities for several hours so the children could study in quiet. The father made it gently but very clear that his sons needed higher education to avoid being trapped, as he was, in low paying labor jobs, but that the family was too poor to pay for their college education.

1. What is the purpose of higher education?
2. To gain skills to earn the best living possible?
3. To gain a better understanding of our society, the world, of culture and arts, and of political and economic systems?
4. To understand yourself better psychologically and emotionally so you can function better in life in love, community, and work.
5. To improve yourself -- morally, spiritually, and/or religiously?