Having recently read the excellent Behold the Dreamers, an immigrant novel with interesting characters facing the dead-end of their American dream, I had hoped for similar insight in this title from a Chinese-American perspective.
 
A brief summary of the plot:- the make-up empire of super wealthy businessman Charles Wang goes bust in the financial crisis, so he gathers together second trophy wife, Barbra, takes his kids Grace and Andrew out of school and college and together with elderly family retainer Ama drives an old car from California to the East where elder daughter Saina lives in the sticks after a crashing failure in her art career. Charles’ ultimate dream is to go back to his mythical ancestral lands in China.
 
Sounds as if it should be fun - and some passages do raise a chuckle - but the posturing is excessive with its acronyms and cool jargon, name- and brand-dropping, and the passages on the reasons for the financial crisis read like they were copied from incoherent second-rate economics theses found in Google searches. The demise of the first Mrs Wang was black humour turned into more of a disturbing grey.
 
Plus the Chinese dialogue that is left untranslated displays the arrogance of an author who is dismissive of her less-advantaged readers. I once went to a talk in Australia given by a famous Canadian author who repeatedly lapsed into French without explanation and which was clearly aimed at the educated high-brow contingent of her audience at the expense of us English-only ignoramuses who were left puzzled while the fawning elite gushed and clapped at her French in-jokes and reminiscences. Perhaps some idiot PR person had told her that all Australians interested in her books were members of Alliance Francaise, but the damage was done and I’ve never been inclined to read anything she's written since. So I’m afraid I feel the same about Jade Chang.
 
After persevering to the half-way mark, I was finally done in after the chapter on Saina’s career which is especially excruciating with its hip art chatter which might be clever if you are in the know about the New York art scene. At this point, I couldn’t care less if any of these unappealing poor rich people crashed and burned or found their Shangri La or not and I scanned my way to the end.  Two flickering stars for the occasional chuckles.

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Booktopia

Back in 1960 when I was on a summer holiday with my parents in the Cape Province of South Africa, I spotted a groovy, nattily-dressed young guy getting on a bus and my teen heart was all a flutter.
 
Only problem was as soon as I saw him take seat in the “Coloureds Only” section, I was shocked - not because he was “coloured” (he just looked tanned to me) - but because being a “white” girl I wasn’t allowed to be attracted to such a boy. Heaven forbid I should mention it out loud to anyone because you didn’t know who was listening and if I openly expressed an attraction to someone of mixed race, in my naivety I actually thought I might get sent to jail. Hard to believe these days, but that was how one was conditioned to think when visiting South Africa. Also, some years later in the early 1970s when I took a ship from Durban to Australia I made friends with a lovely couple from Nyasaland (now Malawi). He was white, she was black and they had three children. While transiting South Africa from Nyasaland by train, the husband had been forced to travel in "white" carriages and his wife and children were forced into the "black" carriages. In Durban, they had to stay in separate hotels and could have nothing to do with one another until they boarded the ship. 
 
Trevor Noah’s coming-of-age book brought back these memories for me. Although he was born in the 1980s when apartheid was wavering but still held its grip on the country, much of what he encountered growing up hadn’t changed. For a Xhosa woman to have relations with a white Swiss man was officially a crime. How Trevor’s independently-minded and slightly eccentric mother bravely negotiated her life with her son makes for moving and astonishing reading. That Trevor came out of it with the sense of humour and prodigious gift for satire that have now made him a successful and much loved entertainer is an even greater tribute to her.
 
Trevor’s unique situation, being neither Black nor White, and not even quite Coloured under the legal definition of those days, makes for sober but occasionally hilarious reading. His desperate tales of trying to get a girlfriend, or about the casting out of the demon and buying a toffee apple had me laughing out loud, but those about his mother’s troubled second relationship and what eventually happened to her nearly had me in tears.
 
In any memoir such as this, there is always going to be comedic exaggeration or poetic licence and there are quite a few gaping holes in his youthful career path apart from being a DJ and pirating and hustling CD’s, but possibly these will be filled in another future book.
 
Now that some places in the world are looking like reviving these despicable old prejudices and racial divides, we need to be reminded of what it was like to live under such systems and I can’t recommend this book highly enough for that reason.

​Four-and-a half stars.

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Booktopia