jock librarian

Marilyn Chin spins together forty-one tales into this wild, fiercely inventive novel about Moonie and Mei Ling Wong, a pair of Chinese-American twin sisters growing up under the watchful eye of "the Great Matriarch," their cleaver-wielding grandmother. The books begins with a fearless Moon taking revenge on a group of "trashy white boys" who have humiliated her. Moon's retaliation is sardonically described: "For thirty days and thirty nights [she] scoured the seaside howling, windswept--in search of blond victims. They would drown on their surfboards, or collapse while polishing their cars." Subsequent sections of the book follow the sisters' transformation from Chinese food delivery girls ("certain Wong-named-nobodies") to two overtly ambitious young women ("I'm attending Stanford and Mei Ling's at Harvard, both of us on pre-med scholarships and on our way to becoming important doctors"). Throughout the novel, Chin playfully sprinkles her tales with Chinese myths, parables, Taoist thought and Confucian beliefs, while presenting a terrifically diverse cast of characters including a young monk, donkey, ex-San Diego Charger, eight-armed bodhisattva, surfer and cook. The chorus of first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants is especially rich. Their voices are full of yearning, hope, rage, passion and pain.