THE EIGHTH PROMISE
A Memoir
by William Poy Lee
KIRKUS REVIEW
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 weaves his 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.
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The Eighth Promise
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother is a memoir written by William Poy Lee published in 2007 by Rodale Books. The paperback version was released October 2007. A translation into Mandarin Chinese is in development with the Chinese Professors of American language and Culture Studies.
Contents
1Plot synopsis
2Themes
3Awards and recognition
4References
5External links
Plot synopsis[edit]
The book interweaves a second generation Chinese American man's reflections on his upbringing in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s with an oral history shared by his mother, Poy Jen, and her migration from Toisan, Guangdong.
The author's personal memoir is set against the background of San Francisco of the 1960s and 1970s. Lee reflects on his childhood in working class Chinatown, Chinese American participation in the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and race relations through the era.
The oral histories begin in the Southern Chinese farming villages of Toisan, where Poy Jen was born in 1926. The author shares interviews conducted in his family's original Toisanese dialect, translated into English. Poy Jen makes her mother eight promises before she leaves war-torn China to join her husband in America in 1950.
Throughout the memoir, Lee traces the role of the promises in his own life and his mother's. The eighth promise serves as the thematic center of the book:
"It is the Eighth Promise -- to live with compassion toward all -- that I think of as the ever-living promise, the one for all of one's days. And this promise, this way -- perhaps arising to the level of a moral path -- strikes me as the distillation of all the wisdom of my kin."
Predictable, even trite.
-------
The Eighth Promise
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother is a memoir written by William Poy Lee published in 2007 by Rodale Books. The paperback version was released October 2007. A translation into Mandarin Chinese is in development with the Chinese Professors of American language and Culture Studies.
Contents
1Plot synopsis
2Themes
3Awards and recognition
4References
5External links
Plot synopsis[edit]
The book interweaves a second generation Chinese American man's reflections on his upbringing in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s with an oral history shared by his mother, Poy Jen, and her migration from Toisan, Guangdong.
The author's personal memoir is set against the background of San Francisco of the 1960s and 1970s. Lee reflects on his childhood in working class Chinatown, Chinese American participation in the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and race relations through the era.
The oral histories begin in the Southern Chinese farming villages of Toisan, where Poy Jen was born in 1926. The author shares interviews conducted in his family's original Toisanese dialect, translated into English. Poy Jen makes her mother eight promises before she leaves war-torn China to join her husband in America in 1950.
Throughout the memoir, Lee traces the role of the promises in his own life and his mother's. The eighth promise serves as the thematic center of the book:
"It is the Eighth Promise -- to live with compassion toward all -- that I think of as the ever-living promise, the one for all of one's days. And this promise, this way -- perhaps arising to the level of a moral path -- strikes me as the distillation of all the wisdom of my kin."
Themes[edit]
The multiple levels of the narrative can be summarized as:
The author's personal story. As a memoir, the author talked about his humble origins, early education assimilation rites of passage and later activist involvement in high school and the Asian American movement. In later sections, he focused on his heartbreaking fight for his brother's right to a fair trial, when he was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in the violent prisons of California.
The author's family story. Both his parents came from Toisan, a Southeastern village city in China's Pearl River Delta where thousands of people emigrated to North America from the 1850s through the twentieth century, originally as laborers and after the 1949 Communist assumption of power over mainland China, as refugees.
His description of these Toisanese American pioneers succinctly sums up the history of these early Chinese Americans to the United States, a relatively unknown story of initial welcome, and later of ethnic cleansing as thousands were violently driven out from towns and cities throughout the West into a few urban enclaves that came to be known as Chinatowns.
San Francisco Chinatown’s evolution as a community with its capability of passing down positive traditions and providing institutional stability to its besieged community as well as its dark side of enforcing a Jim Crow system and as patrons and protectors of organized crime and of police and political bribery.
The author's defiance at being a stereotyped "model minority." After achieving goals in the corporate world as an international lawyer, the author reveals that he started to reflect on the meaning in life, the dual cultural tracks of his mother's Toisanese values and wisdom and of being a fully assimilated and successful American. He decided to write full-time and part of that included traveling back to China with his mother in 2000 to visit his ancestral village. The author now devotes part to his writing towards improving ethnic and cultural understanding between the two major cultures of America and China. Consequently, he spent three years finishing this book.
Awards and recognition[edit]
Media outlets such as NPR, Fora TV and universities such as University of Kansas have invited the author for speaking engagements and interviews. Although the book primarily depicts the life of a Chinese American, many of the most avid and vocal readers are from other ethnicities such as Hispanics and Italian Americans. In late October 2007, the book won the 2007 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for outstanding and original contribution to multicultural literature. The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan selected the book for its 2008 One city one book program, Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads.[1]
References[edit]
^ "Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads 2008: China and America: Bridging Two Worlds". Ann Arbor District Library. Retrieved 2008-05-03.
The Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother, William Poy Lee. Rodale Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1594864568
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William Poy Lee
William P. Lee
| |
|---|---|
| Born | 1951 (age 67–68) San Francisco |
| Occupation | Author, Political Activist |
| Language | English |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley Hastings School of Law |
| Notable works | |
| Notable awards | PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award |
William Poy Lee (Chinese: 李培湛) is an author and political activist currently living in Shanghai, China. His 2007 book The Eighth Promise is a memoir about two generations of Chinese Americans, in China and Chinatown, San Francisco.
Before becoming a writer, Mr. Lee worked as an international banking attorney and an advertising executive. Mr. Lee left the professional world and has traveled, lived and taught writing in China since 2008. As a political activist, his most recent endeavor is a website about Tibet, Tibet China Accuracy Project[1]
References[edit]
- ^ Kuai, James. "Insider Outsider: An Interview with Author William Poy Lee". University of Southern California. Retrieved 2013-03-10.
External links[edit]
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Amazon Review
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.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Amazon Review
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.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1951 to Chinese American parents, Lee attends Chinese-language school every day after his American school, and grows up with the handed-down teachings of his Toisanese (southeastern Chinese) mother embedded in his psyche. When he finally visits her ancestral village as an adult, he discovers the clan culture she has so faithfully described still thriving there. The women still carry out the marriage promises they made to their mothers, just as his mother did to her mother, especially the eighth and last promise: to live with compassion toward others. Upon his return he tapes 30 hours of conversation with his reminiscing mother, and intersperses his own words with her memories to create this enlightening, thought-provoking memoir. She shares centuries-old wedding traditions and soups to make strong, healthy offspring; he writes of getting involved in San Francisco's counterculture scene, including organizing the first Chinese American civil-rights march. Lee's story is part multigenerational saga and part tale of race-fueled political turmoil, fused with a refreshingly honest portrayal of a timeless mother-son bond. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“The Eighth Promise is the rare book that tells a story we have not heard before, yet poses questions that are eternal. Who are we, having left the land of our ancestors and settled among others similarly displaced? How do we find 'home' in the present when the past meant a thousand years in the same place? How do we honor parents--particularly our mothers--whose lives were the bridge that brought us safely to a more promising land? In this unusual, wise, insightful and healing memoir, William Lee Poy explores territory that reflects and intrigues us all.” —Alice Walker
“One of the very few books that completely conveys a life as lived from the inside and makes us as readers feel we are living it too.” —Gloria Steinem
“At once a family story, a political tale, a crucial piece of American history, a drama of betrayal and ultimate survival, The Eighth Promise promises to be a book that will be read by generations of readers.” —Kim Chernin, author of In My Mother's House
“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...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.” —Publishers Weekly starred review
“Peppered with wit and sarcasm, this gracefully told saga forgoes melodrama.” —Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A-)
“The Eighth Promise is a lively read and a significant contribution to the body of literature that continues to bubble up from the steaming cauldron that is the American immigrant experience.” —Salon.com
“Whatever our level of familiarity with the main ingredients of this story, it nevertheless continues to exert a powerful allure. After reading William Poy Lee's The Eighth Promise, we are reminded why: Each family has its own emotional landscapes, its own idiosyncrasies and neuroses. In the end, it is observing the way particular families respond to stress that makes such narratives so compelling.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
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About the Author
WILLIAM POY LEE, formerly an architect and now a lawyer, lives in Berkeley, California. This is his first book.
21 customer reviews
Top Reviews
Gigi
5.0 out of 5 starsExcellent Life Lessons, Beautifully CraftedApril 8, 2015
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I have bought and shared more than a dozen copies of this book with friends and coworkers. The story is an amazing journey, full of life lessons. It's also a glimpse into the world of 1965 San Francisco, where Chinese-American relations with the politicians and people in power in San Francisco were tense. William Lee decides to interview his mother, to document the story about her life. In the self-effacing way, she says she has no story to tell. She says her life is uninteresting and boring. But William presses on and what unfolds is rich, touching, and original. It's a story that is full of authenticity, exposing the struggles faced by first and second generation Chinese immigrants who sacrificed greatly to come to America. It showed how the Taoanese Sisterhood method of "Talking in Round" crossed the ocean and brought understanding and solutions to discordant situations in the city and to racial problems in the prisons. It's a beautifully crafted piece and the eight promises are excellent guides. I work in the field of collaborative divorce and see this as an excellent tool for resolution of conflict.
2 people found this helpful
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RockawayRa
5.0 out of 5 starsA real five star gemApril 26, 2007
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
I was referred to this book by a Chinese American friend, and I just loved it. Since I live in San Francisco, I was very interested in the fascinating history of early Chinatown with sad parts about corrupt politics and gang violence, the latter taking a personal toll on the author's family. The most fascinating part, however, had to do with Lee's mother, a remarkable Toisan female leader. His realization of her unique leadership of the community, and the values of the Toisan clan were moving and important. I must say that I have been referring the book to everyone I know, Asian or not. It was a moving book that I really enjoyed.
6 people found this helpful
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Andrew L. Yee Jr.
5.0 out of 5 starsA Thoughtful Insight into Our CultureAugust 10, 2008
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This was one of the most thoughtful personal readings that I have read in a long time. It gives insight into our culture as we know it. Many of us, myself included, have had one or both parents come to the U.S. from Hong Kong area. As children we may have not fully understood what they were trying to impart regarding their experiences growing up. Yet we held on to these oral histories. It is refreshing to see that someone has chosen to reduce the oral histories to written stories and share with others. I found that there is re-affirmation,common experiences and comfort in this book. It was well worth the read and is worth re-reading. Thank you.
2 people found this helpful
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Randy
5.0 out of 5 starsGreat book for a bookclubMay 2, 2007
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
I read this book with my bookclub. The hostess knew William and invited him to join us, so we had the pleasure of meeting the author! He is extremely interesting and articulate. His book is a fabulous journey of discovery. The stories his mother tells are truly amazing. The manner in which he presents the 2 different voices is extremely successful, alternating between his story and his mother's. The culture of Southern China, which formed the basis for his mother's story, is inspiring. The 8 promises (and especially the 8th) are equally applicable to today's world and would change the world if everyone allowed themselves to follow them! Don't miss this book.
8 people found this helpful
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Linda L. McGlothlin
3.0 out of 5 starsalso the parts where his mother was speaking were my favorite. howeverJuly 28, 2017
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
very interesting details of Chinatown in san fran in 60's and 70's , also the parts where his mother was speaking were my favorite. however ,mr lee seems to have written an ode to himself rather than his mother.
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Yu Kinwei
3.0 out of 5 starsconfused ABCJanuary 13, 2011
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I am of the same generation as the author and an ABC, American Born Chinese, as well. I grew up in a Hoisan household,not in the complex and rich world of SF's Chinatown. My sisters and I had to suffer the isolation of life in Pittsburgh among approximately a hundred other Hoisanese immigrants and their children.
While the account of the author's brother was tragic and revealing about the political climate of San Francisco at that time. What really made me wonder was the idyllic recollection of his household and relationship with his mother. Any Hoisanese worthy of his "hom ngui" (salted fish)can recall the horrible insults, put-downs and threats that were common such as in my house by our mother. Perhaps he was one of the lucky ones?
I don't know?
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