The Mysteries of Chinatown Revealed

As a native San Franciscan, I have always loved visiting Chinatown, with its storefronts crowded with cheap consumer goods and its grocery stores beckoning with the glistening brown bodies of roasted duck.

When I was growing up my father used to take my brothers and me to the Hang Ah tea room on Pagoda Place every Sunday for dim sum. It was in that crowded restaurant that I first developed a taste for fried taro root and ginger infused pot stickers.

I am familiar with Chinese restaurants, fortune cookies, and firecrackers. But I regret to say that I still feel ignorant about the character of the Chinese. I see the elderly Chinese men and women in their blue silk Mao jackets reading Chinese newspapers and can’t reconcile them with the hip, impeccably dressed Chinese artists and engineers who make up much of the younger generation.

That was until I read Kathryn Ma’s excellent collection of short stories, All That Work and Still No Boys.
 
In this short story collection, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, Ma peels back the curtain of the Chinese culture to reveal its humorous, exasperating, and moving forms. She is in a perfect position to serve as an ambassador between the two worlds; her parents were born in China and immigrated to the United States while Ma practiced corporate law in San Francisco for years before pursuing writing.

In the story that gives the collection its name, Ma tells the story of a woman who needs a kidney transplant. Of her four children, only her son is a match, but the woman cannot imagine asking such a favor from her only male heir. So she keeps on pestering her daughters for one of their kidneys. Her mother’s preference for her son – which is completely acceptable in Chinese culture – seems sexist in modern California and Ma weaves this dichotomy into an absorbing and moving story.

Not all of Ma’s characters are Chinese-American and she shouldn’t be pigeonholed as an ethnic writer. Her use of words and the tension she draws in her descriptions of family transcend any label. Race is just one theme that Ma explores in this winning collection.

All That Work and Still No Boys has been widely praised. Bestselling novelist Curtis Sittenfeld wrote on the Daily Best website that the collection was “completely wonderful.”

Ma will be speaking at Mrs. Dalloway’s Books in Berkeley on October 1 at 7 pm. She will also speak at 2:30 pm on Saturday Oct. 3 at the Chinatown branch of the San Francisco public library. Ma will also participate in Litquake, the city’s foremost literary festival, at a forum for first time authors. That event will be at 5:30 pm Oct. 12 at The Foundation Center at 312 Sutter Street.

Now that I have read the book, I feel I have a slightly better understanding of this group that has been so essential to the development of California. I will also never take my kidneys for granted again.

Bay Area Literary Tidbits

The New York Times featured a profile of Oakland writer Melanie Gideon, whose memoir, The Slippery Year, will be published by Knopf next week.

The title of the article: Car-Pool Epiphanies: A Memoir About the Ordinary, says a lot about the book. “Melanie Gideon does not have a story of divorce, death or abuse to tell. Nor does she write of recovery from cancer, drug addiction or even a miserable childhood,” says the article.

“This really is a book about nothing,” confirms Gideon, who is a write at San Francisco’s Writer’s Grotto.

Well, I have read the book, and while it is true the most dramatic plot element involved Gideon driving five hours to spy on her son while he is at sleep-away camp (either to make sure he is okay or just because she misses him so much) the book really is about finding happiness in ordinary life.

And her first chapter, when her husband buys a deluxe motor home, was so funny that I burst into laughter a half a dozen times.

Gideon will be at A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland on August 12 as well at some other venues in the Bay Area.



Another Bay Area writer, Kathryn Ma, is getting lots of advance praise for her linked collection of stories, All That Work and Still No Boys.

Curtis Sittenfeld, the author of Prep and An American Wife, listed Ma’s book as one of her favorite five books on The Daily Beast. Sittenfeld even went so far as to predict that Ma would win the Pulitzer Prize for her work. (She also praises the work of Jennie Capo Crucet. Sittenfled selected both authors to win an Iowa fiction prize.)

“When Crucet and Ma become really famous and win Pulitzers, I plan to pretend I discovered them,” writes Sittenfeld.

In another contest, Stephen Elliot, the Grotto dweller, founder of The Rumpus, founder of The Progressive Reading Series, author of seven books, and self-declared masochist and wild man, was voted the Bay Area’s favorite writer.

Recent book sales by Bay Area authors, via Publishers Marketplace:

Sister Madonna Buder and Karin Evans's IRON SPIRIT: The Wisdom and Inspiration of Sister Madonna Buder, World Champion Triathlete, about the 79-year-old nun and Ironman competitor known on the circuit as the Iron Nun, to Marysue Rucci at Simon & Schuster, in a good deal, at auction, by Elisabeth Weed at Weed Literary.

Radio show host, magazine writer and frequent contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle Tony DuShane's CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE JESUS JERK, loosely based on his experience growing up a Jehovah's Witness, to Anne Horowitz at Soft Skull, by Mollie Glick of Foundry Literary + Media.

Journalist (formerly with the SF Chronicle) and author Steven Winn's COME BACK, COMO: Winning the Heart of a Reluctant Dog, to Carole Tonkinson at Harper UK, by Juliette Shapland at Harper, on behalf of the Amy Rennert Agency. (Foreign rights have also been sold to France, Holland, Poland and China)

Thomas Peele's KILLING THE MESSENGER: the Assassination of Chauncey Bailey and the Ruination of an American City, a chilling story of murder, journalism, politics and intrigue that investigates the brutal slaying of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey, who was gunned down in 2007 for writing a story about Your Black Muslim Bakery, the business front of a violent polygamist cult, to Jenna Ciongoli at Broadway, in a pre-empt, for publication in Fall 2011, by Elizabeth Evans at Reece Halsey New York (NA).

Kathryn Ma wins the Iowa Short FIction Prize

Every once in a while, a talented writer gets a break that you know is going to bring them the critical attention their work deserves.

Such is the case with San Francisco writer Kathryn Ma. A former attorney-turned-full-time-writer, Ma’s short stories have been published in The Antioch Review, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Threepenny Review. Now Ma has won one of the most prestigious prizes of all – the Iowa Short Fiction award. It’s a contest where hundreds of writers from around the country submit their short story manuscripts and one is selected for publication.

Ma’s story collection, All That Work And Still No Boys, won the competition. It will be published by University of Iowa Press in October 2009. “In this collection, Ma’s sharply-observed stories expose the deepest fears and longings that we mask in family life and observe the long shadows cast by history and displacement,” according to the press release announcing Ma’s selection.

To make the award even more sweet, Ma’s manuscript was selected by Curtis Sittenfeld, the author of the critically acclaimed books Prep and American Wife. (It’s always nice when a well-respected author likes your work.) In 2008, Ma won the Meyerson Award for Fiction from the Southwest Review for the story that gives the title to her forthcoming book. The judge in that competition was Jim Shepard, the author of Like You Would Understand, Anyway: Stories.

Ma, whose parents emigrated from China, has three daughters and I think her book refers to Chinese tradition where boys are more prized than girls.

I have know Kathryn for a few years. We met in Geyserville, a small town north of Healdsburg in Sonoma County, where both our families have summer houses. We started talking because of our common interest in writing, and it’s a conversation that has never ended. We don’t see one another frequently, but when we do, we always dive right in to the world of books, writing, and publishing. Now there will be even more to talk about.

Bay Area Literary News

Kathryn Ma, a San Francisco writer, has won the David Nathan Meyerson Fiction prize from the Southwest Review for a short story called “All that Work and Still No Boys.”

The prize adds to Ma’s long list of achievements. Her short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices and she was a finalist for the Bakeless Prize and the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel.

Jim Shepard, the novelist and short story writer served as judge. This was what he said about Ma’s story:

"Kathryn Ma's 'All That Work and Still No Boys,' with the kind of brisk and wry dispatch that its protagonist would recognize, negotiates the minor and major agonies of a family crisis, as well as the subterranean stresses of the inevitably accompanying family history, with an enviable grace and a loving but clear-eyed even-handedness. The characters and relationships are beautifully observed, and rendered with a clarity and a compassionate insight that honors both their pain and their ongoing attempts, however imperfect, to pitch in on one another's behalf."


Joe Quirk is one of the funniest Bay Area writers – and he doesn’t write comedy. He writes about biology. I first saw him in 2007 at the Carmel Author and Ideas Festival. He talked on the stage for 15 minutes about reproduction and kept the audience rapt – and laughing – the entire time. Quirk has a new book out, It’s Not You, It’s Biology: The Science of Love, Sex, and Relationships, and he is making the rounds of Bay Area bookstores. He will be appearing Monday, Sept. 8 at Books, Inc on Park Boulevard in Alameda.

The LA Times has a long feature about Amy Tan's Bonesetter's Daughter and its journey to becoming an opera.