The Eighth Promise

The Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother is a memoir written by William Poy Lee published in 2007 by Rodale Books. The paperback version was released October 2007 and the author is working with Chinese Professors of American language and Culture Studies on a translation into Mandarin Chinese.

Plot synopsis

The author's mother makes her mother eight promises before she leaves war-torn China to join her husband in America in 1950. The eighth is the most influential to the author. In the book, the authors writes:

"It is the Eighth Promise -- to live with compassion toward all -- that I think of as the ever-living promise, the one for all of one's days. And this promise, this way -- perhaps arising to the level of a moral path -- strikes me as the distillation of all the wisdom of my kin."

In the book, author William Poy Lee gives us a rare memoir that touches on many dimensions beyond his personal experience. His moving stories start amidst the Southern Chinese farming villages of Toisan, where his mother was born in 1926 and raised and later left after World War II. 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. He successfully utilizes his narrative to summarize the upheavals of civil rights era, Vietnam War, and the counterculture and of his own coming-of-age.

Themes

The multiple levels of the narrative can be summarized as:

1. The author's personal story. As a memoir, the author talked about his humble origins, early education assimilation rites of passage and later activisit involvement in high school and the Chinese American Civil Rights movement. In later sections, he focused on his heartbreaking fight for his brother's right to a fair trial, when he was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in the violent prisons of California.
2. The author's family story. Both his parents came from Toisan, a Southeastern village city in China's Pearl River Delta where thousands of people emigrated to North America from the 1850s through the twentieth century, originally as laborers and after the 1949 Communist assumption of power over mainland China, as refugees. His description of these Toisanese American pioneers succinctly sums up the history of these early Chinese Americans to the United States, a relatively unknown story of initial welcome, and later of ethnic cleansing as thousands were violently driven out from towns and cities throughout the West into a few urban enclaves that came to be known as Chinatowns.
3. San Francisco Chinatown’s evolution as a community with its capability of passing down positive traditions and providing institutional stability to its besieged community as well as its dark side of enforcing a Jim Crow system and as patrons and protectors of organized crime and of police and political bribery.
4. The author's defiance at being a stereotyped "model minority." After achieving goals in the corporate world as an international lawyer, the author reveals that he started to reflect on the meaning in life, the dual cultural tracks of his mother's Toisanese values and wisdom and of being a fully assimilated and successful American. He decided to write full-time and part of that included traveling back to China with his mother in 2000 to visit his ancestral village. The author now devotes part to his writing towards improving ethnic and cultural understanding between the two major cultures of America and China. Consequently, he spent three years finishing this book.

Critical reception

This book has received much critical acclaim since its launch in March 2008. Media outlets such as NPR, Fora TV and universities such as University of Kansas have invited the author for speaking engagements and interviews. It is worthwhile to notice that although the book primarily depicts the life of a Chinese American, many of the most avid and vocal readers are from other ethnicities such as Hispanics and Italian Americans. The Eighth Promise seems to strike a chord with many Americans with its universal themes.

Awards and recognition

In late October 2007, the book won the 2007 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for outstanding and original contribution to multicultural literature. The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan selected the book for its 2008 One city one book program, Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads.

References

• The Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother, William Poy Lee. Rodale Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1594864568

External links

• Author/book website