Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen” by Marilyn Chin. The story is told in 41 tales that are, at turns, lyrical, ironical, fantastical and satirical. Then there are the gratuitously profane and vulgar parts, which can at best be described as provocative, and will surely challenge many a reader’s comfort zone. Its practical effect might be that the book would be embraced for college teaching but barred from the average high school English class.

It is too bad, since one wonders what a teenager would make of the characters’ hijinks and romps. The grandmother —- who does not appear to ever leave home without her cleaver —- visits the San Francisco mayor’s new water garden and kills the carp gifted by the Emperor Hirohito of Japan, because “Hirohito was a mass murderer and rapist and this pond was built with Chinese blood.” Moonie does Gung-fu (kung-fu) on unsuspecting boys. Mei Ling, the sexpot of the two, constantly throws herself at men, testing her powers and satisfying a desire that no respectable Chinese girl should dare admit. All the while, there is a huge dance around prepping, cooking, serving and delivering food to customers of Double Happiness, the restaurant owned by the grandmother. Throughout the novel, Moonie and Mei Long move inexorably toward fulfilling their Chinese immigrant destiny: both go to Ivy League colleges and become successful.

But there is a fundamental strain of sadness that courses through the book. The girls are basically abandoned by their parents at an early age —- the overworked and unappreciated father dies early and suddenly, and the mother never finds her element in America and eventually moves back to Hong Kong, leaving the girls to the grandmother’s care.

All unhappy aspects of the immigrant story are presented: the long hours, the sacrifices made in the struggle to make good, the battle between one’s culture and values and the culture and values of the new land, being the lower-class citizen in the new country, the unhappy past that was left behind but whose ghosts or scars still follow everyone around.

By Jacqueline Zhang Kim. Read entire article.