Steer Toward Rock: A Novel

by Fae Myenne Ng

Overview

"The woman I loved wasn't in love with me; the woman I married wasn't a wife to me. Ilin Cheung was my wife on paper. In deed, she belonged to Yi-Tung Szeto. In debt, I also belonged to him. He was my father, paper too."

Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng's heartbreaking novel of unrequited love, tells the story of the only bachelor butcher at the Universal Market in San Francisco. Jack Moon Szeto—that was the name he bought, the name he made his life by — serves the lonely grass widows whose absentee husbands work the farmlands in the Central Valley. A man who knows that the body is the only truth, Jack attends to more than just their weekly orders of lamb or beef.

But it is the free-spirited, American-born Joice Qwan with whom Jack falls in love. A woman whose life is guided by more than simple pain, Joice hands out towels at the Underground Bathhouse and sells tickets at the Great Star Theatre; her mother cleans corpses. Joice wants romance and she wants to escape Chinatown, but Jack knows that she is his ghost of love, better chased than caught.

It is the 1960s and while the world is on the edge of an exciting future, Jack has not one grain of choice in his life. When his paper wife arrives from China he is forced to fulfill the last part of his contract and to stand before the law with the woman who is to serve as mistress to his fake father. Jack has inherited a cruel cultural legacy. A man with no claim to the past, his only hope is to make a new story for himself, one that includes both Joice and America.

Not since Bone, Fae Myenne Ng's highly praised debut novel, has a work so eloquently revealed the complex loyalties of Chinese America. Steer Toward Rock is the story of a man who chooses love over the law, illuminating a part of U.S. history few are aware of, but one that has had echoing effects for generations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786860975
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	05/01/2008
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Fae Myenne Ng was born in San Francisco, and lives in Northern California and New York City. Her short stories have appeared in Harper's and other magazines, and have been widely anthologized.

What People are Saying About This

This is an always gorgeous and often terrifying love story. It’s a poetic study of loyalty, love, loneliness, hard work, identity, immigration and political paranoia. I sing an honor song for Fae Myenne Ng’s return with her new novel. It has already claimed a special place on my bookshelf alongside those few books that I read and read again. --Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Fae Myenne Ng writes like a bebop jazzer, a Miles Davis trumpet solo, tough and trenchant; moody and poetic; erratic and explosive, with surprising lines leading to beauty and to truth. Steer Toward Rock draws you into a family and pulls you into Chinatown, behind the glittery facades; beneath the gritty surfaces. Here’s how the people there talk, work, think, fight and love. I feel as though I’ve just read a future classic. --Ben Fong Torres, author of The Rice Room

Here is a tale about illegal aliens from China, told with their own images, idioms, and axioms—and charming humor. Theirs are rich, complex lives, traversing the worlds and interrupted by immigration laws, "laws by men that collided with laws or our ancestors." An intriguing book most relevant now, Steer Toward Rock is a truly poetic novel. --Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.

In Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng confirms the extraordinary talent she displayed in Bone. She makes brilliant use of economy; her characterizations are flawless, never overdone. She creates a world of people whose lives are centered in bonds and promises, who live without great expectation but with hope and strength of will. Steer Toward Rock is richly and beautifully crafted by virtue of the author’s skill. It is a fine, rewarding novel. --Robert Stone, author of Dog Soldiers

Fae Myenne Ng has written a luminous love story.... Her protagonist Jack Szeto, beset on all sides, a stranger in a strange land, must choose between the love of his life and the only family he has ever known. Set in a San Francisco as strange as it is quixotic and peopled with a host of heart-break characters Steer Toward Rock is a joy of a novel. --Junot Díaz, author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Editorial Reviews

This eagerly awaited follow-up to Fae Myenne Ng's first novel, Bone, again addresses the issues of Chinese-American identity in this moving, unflinching yet sometimes witty story. Jack Moon Szeto enters San Francisco in 1952, falsely posing as the son of Yi-Tung "Gold" Szeto, a registered U.S. citizen. In return, Jack must pay Szeto by working for two years and marrying a "fake wife." Employed as a butcher, Jack takes the younger Joice Qwan as his lover. Even though she becomes pregnant, Joice refuses to marry Jack. Despondent, Jack attempts to nullify his contract with Szeto before entering the INS's Chinese Confession Program and renouncing his false identity, resulting in Szeto's deportation, but not citizenship for Jack. Toward the end, the story shifts to Jack's congenial relationship with his spirited daughter Veda, whose growing mission is to protect Jack by making him a naturalized U.S. citizen. Ng's simple, sturdy yet poetic prose is juxtaposed against the clinical language of Jack's immigration documents; the result is a nuanced portrayal of two generations and the many challenges they face in their quest for security and fulfillment. (May)

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Publishers Weekly

Combining elements of gangster noir, romance, grumpy-old-man comedy, and family drama, Ng finds a fresh and exciting way to tell a familiar story.

Elle

A searing portrait of another immigrant struggling to get by. . . . Ng brings to this moving story both a sensuous, poetic style and an understated tone that only serves to underline the immigrant struggle.

Booklist

As recent work by Ha Jin, Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri attest, the immigrant experience is an essential story for our time. Issues of race and social class, long the thematic fodder of novelists, have become more complex with the explosion of immigrant communities. The prime American theme of identity has become political and moral, as native and immigrant alike confront what it means to be the "other" to those who live next door to you. Fae Myenne Ng entered this landscape 15 years ago with her much-heralded first novel, Bone. . . . In Steer Toward Rock, Ng takes us to the same Chinatown in an earlier time, the McCarthy era and the turbulent 1960s, offering a more poetic, imagistic and ultimately deeper investigation into the dark and complex heart of the immigrant experience.

Los Angeles Times

It took Ng 15 years to produce her second novel, Steer Toward Rock . . . and those who privilege themselves by reading it through will not for one moment wonder why. Steer Toward Rock is Chinatown again, Immigration, confession, disappointment, wreckage and salvage. It is relentlessly fierce and unstintingly lovely. . . . Ng takes her time, says what she truly means to say, stares complication straight in the face, stares it down. One feels her attacking this fiction-writing business as if it's the most important chance any of us will ever get to put the truth on paper, and one is left-it can't be helped-in awe of her talent.

Chicago Tribune

Ng's second novel (Bone, 1993) depicts the tensions and affections of a complex Chinese-American family in San Francisco. In 1952, Jack Moon Szeto is admitted to the United States as the "son of a native," Gold Szeto, a businessman and fixer for whom he goes to work as a butcher. Jack becomes something of a Chinatown lothario ("Lord of the Peach Blossoms, lucky in the garden" to use his flowery phrase), but that ends when he falls in love with Joice, daughter of the neighborhood's corpse-washer and thus, to many, untouchable by association. When Joice becomes pregnant with a daughter and Gold arranges for Jack's Chinese bride-actually a mistress for his sponsor-to join her "husband" stateside, Jack makes a fateful decision. He informs on Gold to the McCarthy-era Chinese Confession Program, and Gold is deported-not before issuing the order that Jack surrender a pound of flesh (in this case a hand) for his betrayal. Joice, who longs to escape the physical and spiritual confines of Chinatown, moves away and marries. The first half of the book is written in spare, lyrical prose that can be affecting but also frustrating; there's too much grand abstraction, too much dialogue like "Don't be a coolie of love!" and "A muddled heart never leads the hero to a new dawn." Yet Ng also provides brisk, unadorned descriptions of butchery, fortune-cookie making, and more. The book picks up considerably in the second half, which focuses on Jack's American-born daughter and her loving but fractious relationship with her father, who's hampered by poor English, his physical handicap and a childhood whose central, awful event she can scarcely imagine. Here the author discovers her true subject: the culturalgulf between immigrants and their children, between aliens and citizens, the naturalized and the native. Ng's novel finds its force in the latter stages, which explore the bond between a lively, confident American daughter and her remote Chinese father.

Kirkus Reviews