Chinese Prodigal

March 1, 2023

For University of Wisconsin professor Shih, pondering his life after his father's death in 2019 entailed considering what it means to be Asian American in an unaccepting country. Formatted as memoir through essay, his narrative moves from his being the only son of aspiring immigrant parents to the model minority myth, the 1980s murder of Vincent Chin, and current efforts to dismantle affirmative action. Prepub Alert.

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May 15, 2023
University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire English professor Shih presents a raw, moving debut memoir about his complicated relationship with his father and his Asian American identity. Shih, whose family moved to the U.S. from Hong Kong in 1971, lost his father, a traveling salesman, in 2019. Though he knew his father was gravely ill, Shih didn’t travel to Texas to see him before he died. Though he acknowledges that the “easy answer, which is not entirely inaccurate, is that I was self-absorbed and uncaring,” Shih sifts through his past and links his delay to other, more complicated causes, loosely organized into the “eight arguments” of the title. His status as an immigrant who left China when he was just one year old created tensions between his twin ethnic identities; Shih writes that he “mastered English at the expense of Chinese, and not only stopped needing my parents’ guidance in grade school but actively began to distrust it.” Elsewhere, he reflects on episodes of racial violence aimed at Chinese Americans that have occurred in his lifetime and the notion that Asians have unfair advantages in accessing higher education (which he disputes). It amounts to a thoughtful meditation on the gap between the promise the American dream dangles in front of minorities and the realities of their discriminatory treatment. Agent: Laura Usselman, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (Aug.)Correction: An earlier version of this review misnamed the author's academic institution.

July 1, 2023
The outline of writer and professor David Shih's family story is perhaps familiar: his parents left China for America, bought a house, and opened a wholesaling business; he excelled in school, lost his Chinese, and married a white partner. In the aftermath of his father's death, however, Shih found himself trying to understand the vast landscape of laws, expectations, prejudices, and social forces that created his family's "classic immigrant story." Chinese Prodigal carefully prises apart the layers of the familiar narratives to find what lies beneath them. This wide-ranging memoir explores the shifting contours of Asian American identity over the centuries and in the author's own life, from the 1982 killing of Vincent Chin to the concept of affirmative action to the longtime popularity of (and racist stereotypes about) Chinese restaurants in America. Shih is generous to his family and fellow Asian Americans, though often unstinting in his perspective on himself. Chinese Prodigal is an insightful, expansive American story, and it reminds readers that our lives are never far removed from the workings of history.

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Starred review from May 15, 2023
A Chinese American English professor reflects on how race has shaped his life. When Shih was growing up, he never identified as Asian American, a racial moniker forged in the crucible of political struggle that felt illegible to young people like him, who couldn't imagine a pan-Asian identity. "I grew up in the seventies and eighties," he writes, "a time when the significance of Asian-ness was still being hashed out." As he grew, though, experiences like the birth of his biracial son, his appointment to the English department of a predominantly White university, and the murder of a Black man, Akai Gurley, at the hands of an Asian American cop changed the way he viewed his place in America's complex racial geography. It was an evolution his immigrant parents did not always share. "Back then," he writes, "I couldn't explain [to my parents] how our rights had been fought for by the Black Americans they didn't know and not gifted to them by the white Americans they did." Eventually, Shih came to understand himself as an Asian American who troubled the model-minority myth by losing an engineering scholarship and unexpectedly gaining an affirmative action-based fellowship to graduate school for English several years later. He also began to make sense of his parents who, he writes, ultimately supported his stereotype-defying decisions as well as his White wife and future in-laws, relationships he situates within the context of the Supreme Court decision allowing interracial marriage. Throughout this memorable book, Shih is adept at seamlessly weaving historical events into his life story, forging thoughtful, creative connections between his evolution and that of the U.S. The result is an insightful, vulnerable, trenchant, and utterly readable story about belonging that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt that one or more of their identities sets them apart. A profoundly thoughtful, unflinchingly honest Asian American memoir.

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