In her debut memoir in essays, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, poet Jane Wong presents a nonlinear narrative of her life and her household’s lives. Her dad and mom emigrated from China in the Nineteen Eighties, once they have been in their early 20s, and settled on the Jersey Shore to run a Chinese restaurant. “This is the story of lost enterprises,” Wong writes about Atlantic City in the elegiac title essay. “Of boarded-up pizza joints, lonely stuffed animals sans tipsy game operators, echoing parking lots with floating trash, and neon lights toppled over like sand castles.”
Those misplaced enterprises additionally consult with Wong’s father’s playing dependancy, which led to the downfall of the household restaurant, and his eventual disappearance from their lives. His expertise is an element of a bigger story that additionally develops all through the memoir: that of massive playing corporations preying on Asian Americans, permitting playing to take maintain of susceptible communities. These strands of systemic injustice are braided with Wong’s personal reminiscences of her childhood. “Here is one scene, on a shore of many: on the way back to Caesar’s Palace, my mother sits on a boardwalk bench, the dune grass behind her like the back of a throne,” she writes. “From her purse: stolen bread rolls from the Palace Buffet. She chews out all her anger on those bread rolls.”
In the attractive essay “Root Canal Street,” Wong hyperlinks the cruelly informal racism she skilled in center college and highschool, her dad and mom’ upbringing in rural Maoist China and journeys along with her mom to see unlicensed dentists in Chinatown, organized by a good friend of a good friend whom they paid in baked items. “A cornucopia for crowns: crispy almond biscuits; pineapple buns with golden cracks like some fantastical goose egg . . . egg tarts with their pools of custard glory; and chewy winter melon cakes with sesame seeds.”
Wong writes with anger and readability about males who’ve abused her and the racism she’s endured all through her life, together with on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But principally this memoir is a narrative of household as Wong remembers her absent father, her intrepid and resilient mom, her brother and her grandparents. Interspersed between the e book’s longer essays are sections dedicated to Wongmom.com, an imaginary web site the place you possibly can sort a query or fear, and Wong’s mom would supply a reassuring reply. (And for these questioning in regards to the e book’s evocative title: Yes, the memoir features a Bruce sighting.)
Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is experimental in kind and dense with lovely sensory photos, notably of meals. In her personal indelible method, Wong information her coming of age and discovering her place in her household, in poetry and in the world.
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