Beyond the Narrow Gate: The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America - Hardcover

The Chinese this century have endured traumas inconceivable to modern Western generations. Beyond the Narrow Gate is the story of four girls who fled extreme violence, privation, and the Communist Red Army in 1948. Author Leslie Chang hoped to uncover the family history that her mother, one of the girls, was unwilling to talk about and learn her own identity in the process. The gulf between their experiences is profound. As Chang says of her orphaned mother, "At thirteen, she had learned to expect only the worst from life; at thirteen, I thought the greatest tragedy was losing a contact lens." Chang's tale weaves together several themes: her mother's passage from Chinese student to American housewife; the varied experiences of three friends her mother made at an elite girls' school in Taiwan; the mother-daughter relationship; and growing up in an alien culture.

Chang brings great empathy, passion, and descriptive elegance to this important book about the contemporary immigrant experience, exploring territory opened up to us by Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. When the book ends with mother and daughter celebrating Chinese New Year in Taiwan, we share in the understanding that enables them to sit quietly with the ancient aunt who took advantage of the mother when she was a defenseless teenager. For the first time, Chinese celebrations hold meaning for Leslie Chang. --John Stevenson

First-time author Chang rather falteringly describes the flight of her mother and three friends from the Communist takeover of China to middle-class lives in the US. The four women met first in Taiwan, to which their families, supporters in one way or another of Republican Chiang Kai- shek, had managed to escape the advance of Mao Zedong's Communist troops. There they attended a premier girls' school, the ``narrow gate'' that could lead them to the Confucian ideal of higher learning and eventually to America. The author's mother, Mary, made it to Hartford, Conn., where she married an insurance executive, also Chinese, and settled down in a WASP neighborhood. By sheer dint of personality, she made a place there for herself and her family. Twenty years later, she organized a reunion for her Taiwan classmates, beginning the reconnection that led to this book. Because her mother was virtually silent on the subject of her past, Chang began to tease the story out of the classmates, settling on three (here called Suzanne, Dolores, and Margaret) who had also married and launched their new American lives more or less successfully in Pennsylvania, California, and New York City. The author struggles to understand both mother and friends, as well as to clarify her own role as a Chinese- American who does not speak Chinese but still sees whites as the other. With neither the intensity of The Wild Swan nor the intimacy of The Joy Luck Club, this story of Chinese immigrants in America falls flat, partly because of its tangled structure. The story moves from family to family, from past to present, from Taiwan to Queens to Maui, with no clear purpose. Life, of course, is tangledthe lives of these women perhaps more than mostbut Changs eye for detail and willingness to probe can't overcome prose that reads like a final project for a writer's workshop. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.