All That Work and Still No Boys (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781587298226)

How do we survive our family, stay bound to our community, and keep from losing ourselves? In "All That Work and Still No Boys," Kathryn Ma exposes the deepest fears and longings that we mask in family life and observes the long shadows cast by history and displacement.
Here are ten stories that wound and satisfy in equal measure. Ma probes the immigrant experience, most particularly among northern California's Chinese Americans, illuminating for us the confounding nature of duty, transformation, and loss. A boy exposed to racial hatred finds out the true difference between his mother and his father. Two old rivals briefly lay down their weapons, but loneliness and despair won't let them forget the past. A young Beijing tour guide with a terrible family secret must take an adopted Chinese girl and her American family to visit an orphanage. And in the prize-winning title story, a mother refuses to let her son save her life, insisting instead on a sacrifice by her daughter.
Intimate in detail and universal in theme, these stories give us the compelling voice of an exciting new author whose intelligence, insight, and wit imparts a sense of grace to the bitter resentments and enduring ties that comprise family love. Even through the tensions Ma creates so deftly, the peace and security that come from building and belonging to one's own community shine forth.


Author: Kathryn Ma
ISBN-10: 1587298228
ISBN-13: 9781587298226
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2009
Pages: 162
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.51lbs
Size: 9.12h x 5.56w x 0.47d

Review Citation(s):
Multicultural Review 05/01/2010 pg. 46