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April 09, 2010
The Eighth Promise
The Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute to his Toisanese Mother by William Poy Lee is a memoir that starts in the Southern Chinese farming villages of Toisan, where Lee's mother was born in 1926. Structurally, the book alternates chapters between the author's voice and that of his mother, whom the author interviewed in her original Toisanese dialect. But the main part of the book is set against the background of the San Francisco of the 1960s and 1970s. Lee uses the narrative to summarize the upheavals of the civil rights era, the Vietnam War, and the counterculture, and of his own coming-of-age.
Posted by vardigan at April 9, 2010 08:36 AM