![]() ![]() ![]() Mother, in an attempt to escape Ama’s violence, has married another man from the Chinese mainland and struggles instead to shield her children from her husband’s abuse. In their second life in America, Agong has lost the thread of his memories and forgotten his name, the faces of his children, and the place where he buried the family gold-in spite of Ama’s best efforts to beat it out of him. Agong, the family patriarch, was a soldier from the Chinese mainland, 20 years older than Ama when she married him at 18, already a widow and mother of three. From the beginning, the story is one of internalized violence. This debut novel is told from the alternating perspectives of three generations of women from the same family: Ama, the grandmother, who emigrated from Taiwan with her war-addled husband and two children, leaving three other daughters behind Mother, who remembers both Taiwan and the Arkansas chicken farm where they arrived through the lens of poverty and struggle and the daughter, born in this country, who serves as a link between her mother and grandmother which both would be more comfortable severing. In a Taiwanese immigrant family, secrets and myths are indistinguishably intertwined. ![]()
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