“Powerful as myth.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Beautifully written…a jewel of a book.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Powerful…full of magic…you won’t be doing anything of importance until you have finished this book.” —Los Angeles Times
“Wonderful…a significant lesson in what storytelling has to do with memory and inheritance.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Reading it really changed the way I thought about Asian-American history. Our heritage has a lot of difficult stuff in it — a lot of misogyny, a lot of fear and rage and death. It showed me a past that reached beyond borders and languages and cultures to bring together these disparate elements of who we are. I hadn’t seen our history like that before. At that time, we hadn’t seen a lot of Asian-American representations anywhere, so it was a big deal that it even existed. It made me feel validated and seen. That’s what’s so important about books like that. You feel like, Oh my god, I exist here. I exist in this landscape of literature and memoir. I’m here, and I have a story to tell, and it’s among the canon of Asian-American stories that are feminist and that are true to our being. It’s a book that has stayed with me and lived in me.” —Margaret Cho
