★ 2023-04-17
A Chinese American English professor reflects on how race has shaped his life.
When Shih was growing up, he never identified as Asian American, a racial moniker forged in the crucible of political struggle that felt illegible to young people like him, who couldn’t imagine a pan-Asian identity. “I grew up in the seventies and eighties,” he writes, “a time when the significance of Asian-ness was still being hashed out.” As he grew, though, experiences like the birth of his biracial son, his appointment to the English department of a predominantly White university, and the murder of a Black man, Akai Gurley, at the hands of an Asian American cop changed the way he viewed his place in America’s complex racial geography. It was an evolution his immigrant parents did not always share. “Back then,” he writes, “I couldn’t explain [to my parents] how our rights had been fought for by the Black Americans they didn’t know and not gifted to them by the white Americans they did.” Eventually, Shih came to understand himself as an Asian American who troubled the model-minority myth by losing an engineering scholarship and unexpectedly gaining an affirmative action–based fellowship to graduate school for English several years later. He also began to make sense of his parents who, he writes, ultimately supported his stereotype-defying decisions as well as his White wife and future in-laws, relationships he situates within the context of the Supreme Court decision allowing interracial marriage. Throughout this memorable book, Shih is adept at seamlessly weaving historical events into his life story, forging thoughtful, creative connections between his evolution and that of the U.S. The result is an insightful, vulnerable, trenchant, and utterly readable story about belonging that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt that one or more of their identities sets them apart.
A profoundly thoughtful, unflinchingly honest Asian American memoir.
Praise for Chinese Prodigal:
"A profoundly thoughtful, unflinchingly honest Asian American memoir . . . Throughout this memorable book, Shih is adept at seamlessly weaving historical events into his life story, forging thoughtful, creative connections between his evolution and that of the U.S. The result is an insightful, vulnerable, trenchant, and utterly readable story about belonging that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt that one or more of their identities sets them apart.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“An insightful window into the complicated, difficult relationship between Asian Americans and the place they call home . . . a powerful and touching account of maintaining empathy and filiality in the face of political, cultural, and generational differences.”—Collin Chung, International Examiner
“Chinese Prodigal carefully prizes apart the layers of the familiar narratives to find what lies beneath them. This wide-ranging memoir explores the shifting contours of Asian American identity over the centuries and in the author’s own life . . . An insightful, expansive American story, and it reminds readers that our lives are never far removed from the workings of history.”—Jenny Hamilton, Booklist
“A raw, moving debut memoir . . . [Chinese Prodigal] amounts to a thoughtful meditation on the gap between the promise the American dream dangles in front of minorities and the realities of their discriminatory treatment.”—Publishers Weekly
“Enlivened by a fearless intellect, candid personal reckonings, and its moving song of a wounded citizen heart, Chinese Prodigal is as provocative and illuminating as any recent memoir on what it has meant—and means to be—an Asian in America. This is essential reading for anyone keen to understand the unique narratives—both public and private—of the Asian American experience.”—Chang-rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad
“In Chinese Prodigal, David Shih takes us into the intimate relationships within a Chinese American family and explodes out into the world of Asian Americans. This is a meticulous work of reflection, of research, of the intersections between the construction of race and racism in this country. It is an urgent warning that demands a slow reading, an honest quest to bring into light the many hands that hold us back as we grapple with ourselves and each other in a history that is fraught with our invisibility, our malleability, our complicated compliance. Chinese Prodigal is a defiant incantation for those who have brought us here and those we have brought.”—Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Song Poet
“Chinese Prodigal is an intellectually heady exploration of race matters, a deep consideration of the cultural fluidities, mythologizing, and disruption attendant on Asian American identity. Shih recounts the fitful evolution of his own consciousness and an adult life spurred to probe into matters of descent, diaspora, and exilic identity in his own family—Chinese immigrants resettled in Texas, far-flung from ethnic and national roots. A moving autobiography embedded within a seven-story mountain of a journey; compelling, insightful, probing, and emotionally balanced.”—Garrett Hongo, author of The Perfect Sound