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Orphan Bachelors
- A Memoir: On Being a Confession Baby, Chinatown Daughter, Baa-Bai Sister, Caretaker of Exotics, Literary Balloon Peddler, and Grand Historian of a Doomed American Family
- Narrated by: Jane Lui
- Length: 6 hrs
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Publisher's summary
From the best-selling and award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors is an extraordinary memoir of her beloved San Francisco’s Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion.
In pre-Communist China, Fae Myenne Ng’s father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger’s son, evading the Exclusion Act, an immigration law that he believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family. During the McCarthy era, he entered the Confession Program in a failed attempt to salvage his marriage only to have his citizenship revoked to resident alien. Exclusion and Confession, America’s two slamming doors. As Ng’s father said, “America didn’t have to kill any Chinese, the Exclusion Act ensured none would be born.”
Ng was her parents' precocious first born, the translator, the bossy eldest sister. A child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by San Francisco’s Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors—men without wives or children, Exclusion’s living legacy. She and her siblings were their stand-in descendants, Ng’s family grocery store their haven.
Each Orphan Bachelor bequeathed the children their true American inheritance. Ng absorbed their suspicious, lonely, barren nature; she found storytelling and chosen children in the form of her students. Exclusion’s legacy followed her from the back alleys of Chinatown in the '60s, to Manhattan in the '80s, to the high desert of California in the '90s, until her return home in the 2000s when the untimely deaths of her youngest brother and her father devastated the family. As a child, Ng believed her father’s lies; as an adult, she returned to her childhood home to write his truth.
Orphan Bachelors weaves together the history of one family, lucky to exist and nevertheless doomed; an elegy for brothers estranged and for elders lost; and insights into writing between languages and teaching between generations. It also features Cantonese profanity, snakes that cure fear and opium that conquers sorrow, and a seemingly immortal creep of tortoises. In this powerful remembrance, Fae Myenne Ng gives voice to her valiant ancestors, her bold and ruthless Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self, howling in Cantonese, impossible to translate but determined to be heard.
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Story
In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado recreates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years before Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. With Nasser’s nationalization of Egyptian industry, her father, Leon, a boulevardier who conducted business in his white sharkskin suit, loses everything and departs with the family for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxtaposed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.
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A Touching Memoir of a Jewish Family in Egypt
- By Brustar on 06-10-20
By: Lucette Lagnado
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Bitter in the Mouth
- By: Monique Truong
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70’s and 80’s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” are the cruel, mysterious last words that Linda’s grandmother ever says to her.
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"Tasting Words" made this hard to hear!
- By Kate Anderson on 11-06-11
By: Monique Truong
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Remembering Shanghai
- A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels
- By: Isabel Sun Chao, Claire Chao
- Narrated by: Rachel Yong, Claire Chao, Isabel Sun Chao
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations, from vibrant Shanghai to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity and loss against the epic backdrop of a country in turmoil.
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touching stories of resilience and family
- By Rodger on 01-17-21
By: Isabel Sun Chao, and others
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The Parted Earth
- By: Anjali Enjeti
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning more than half a century and cities from New Delhi to Atlanta, Anjali Enjeti’s debut is a heartfelt and human portrait of the long shadow of the partition of the Indian subcontinent on the lives of three generations.
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Riveting
- By MSE on 05-14-21
By: Anjali Enjeti
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The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
- A Novel
- By: Juliet Grames
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 16 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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For Stella Fortuna, death has always been a part of life. Stella’s childhood is full of strange, life-threatening incidents - moments where ordinary situations like cooking eggplant or feeding the pigs inexplicably take lethal turns. Even Stella’s own mother is convinced that her daughter is cursed or haunted. When the Fortunas emigrate to America on the cusp of World War II, Stella and her sister, Tina, must come of age side by side in a hostile new world with strict expectations for each of them.
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Misogyny at its worst
- By brenda on 01-15-20
By: Juliet Grames
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The Latehomecomer
- A Hmong Family Memoir
- By: Kao Kalia Yang
- Narrated by: Kao Kalia Yang
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 70s and 80s, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to the United States, all in search of a new place to call home. Decades later, their experiences remain largely unknown. Kao Kalia Yang was driven to tell her own family's story after her grandmother’s death. The Latehomecomer is a tribute to that grandmother, a remarkable woman whose spirit held her family together.
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Great Hmong history, lousy literature
- By Isadore Ducasse on 10-12-18
By: Kao Kalia Yang
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Nine Continents
- A Memoir In and Out of China
- By: Xiaolu Guo
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.
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must read
- By Jeff Darlington on 10-22-17
By: Xiaolu Guo
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Black Dog of Fate
- A Memoir
- By: Peter Balakian
- Narrated by: Peter Balakian
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.
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Great book!
- By Lm on 06-27-13
By: Peter Balakian
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Bad Indians
- A Tribal Memoir
- By: Deborah A. Miranda
- Narrated by: Deborah Miranda
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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This beautiful and devastating book - part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir - should be required for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. The result is a work of literary art that is wise, angry, and playful all at once, a compilation that will break your heart and teach you to see the world anew.
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Bad recording
- By Aspyn Maes on 09-18-21
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Daughter of Fortune
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. Joaquín takes off for San Francisco to seek his fortune, and Eliza, pregnant with his child, decides to follow him.
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An adventure to the California Gold Fields of 1849
- By Jean on 07-20-20
By: Isabel Allende
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The Secret Life of Sunflowers
- By: Marta Molnar, Dana Marton
- Narrated by: Kendra Murray
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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When Hollywood auctioneer Emsley Wilson finds her famous grandmother's diary while cleaning out her New York brownstone, the pages are full of surprises. The first surprise is, the diary isn't her grandmother's. It belongs to Johanna Bonger, Vincent van Gogh's sister-in-law.
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Nothing like a expected…
- By LOVETOQUILT on 05-06-23
By: Marta Molnar, and others
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The Other Madisons
- The Lost History of a President's Black Family
- By: Bettye Kearse
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Other Madisons, Bettye Kearse - a descendant of a slave named Coreen and, according to oral tradition, President James Madison - finally shares her family story, exploring legacy, race, and the powerful consequences of telling the whole truth.
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Enlightening
- By D C on 08-24-20
By: Bettye Kearse
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
- By: Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
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What in the heck happened?????
- By Melinda on 02-05-14
By: Gabriel García Márquez, and others