Ng, Fae Myenne

Fae Myenne Ng, born on December 2, 1956, in San Francisco, is a Chinese American author, known for her highly acclaimed first novel Bone (1993), a finalist for the 1994 PEN/Faulkner Award, and her second novel Steer Toward Rock (2008), winner of a 2008 American Book Award. Ng's father emigrated from Guangzhou, China, in 1940 as a “paper son” to a legal Chinese immigrant living in San Francisco. Ng grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown and spoke Cantonese at home. Her novels and short stories, all set in San Francisco's Chinatown, reflect her own experience as well as her parents’ lives in Chinatown. Growing up among old Chinese bachelors, who ended up not being able to return home due to the immigration laws that limited the reentry of Chinese laborers, Ng was keenly aware of the adverse impact on the Chinese of US immigration law and miscegenation laws. Ng acknowledges that her stories about Chinese immigrants, old Chinese bachelors, and her experiences in Chinatown are her way of repaying her own “emotional debt” for her father's sacrificing journey. Ng through the novels reexamines the history of Chinese immigrants in a manner that connects the immigrant past to renewed social and economic exclusion experienced by recent immigrants. Ng's depictions of Chinatown and of immigrants confined in their ethnic enclaves underscore the pattern of the labor exploitation of racial minorities that has been continuously functioning with dividing lines between race, ethnicity, and gender.