The End of East
A Novel
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In the tradition of Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri, a moving portrait of three generations of family living in Vancouver's Chinatown
From Knopf Canada's New Face of Fiction program--launching grounds for Yann Martel's Life of Pi and Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees--comes this powerfully evocative novel.
At age eighteen, Seid Quan is the first in the Chan family to emigrate from China to Vancover in 1913. Paving the way for a wife and son, he is profoundly lonely, even as he joins the Chinatown community.
Weaving in and out of the past and the present, The End of East pieces together the spellbinding tale of Seid Quan's family: his wife Shew Lin, whose hope for her family are threatened by her own misguided actions; his son Pon Man, who struggles with obligation and desire; his daughter-in-law Siu Sang, who tries to be the caregiver everyone expects, even as she feels herself unraveling; and his granddaughter Sammy, who finds herself embroiled in a volatile mixture of seduction, grief, and duty.
An exquisite debut of isolation, immigration, romance, and insanity, The End of East sets family conflicts against the backdrop of Vancouver's Chinatown--a city within a city where dreams are shattered as quickly as they're built, and where history repeats itself through the generations. It is a bold and accomplished debut from one of Canada's brightest new literary stars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lee's poignant debut saga covers three generations of a Chinese-Canadian family in Vancouver. Their story begins when Chan Seid Quan emigrates to Vancouver in 1913 at 17, but the novel opens 10 years after his death at the age of 94, when his granddaughter, Samantha, leaves graduate school and a lover in Montreal to return to Vancouver to take care of her mother. Samantha frozen with indecision about her future and resentful that she's burdened with responsibility she didn't choose passes her days contemplating her family's past. Polished, nonchronological set pieces offer glimpses of hardship, alienation and despair in Vancouver's Chinatown. Seid Quan returns to China at intervals separated by years, just often enough to marry, father three children and return to Canada after each visit a lonelier man. His youngest child, a son named Pon Man, relocates to Vancouver in 1951 at 15, and eventually marries and has five daughters, the youngest of whom is Samantha. Seid Quan's wife, Shew Lin, survives war and occupation while caring for her three children, and eventually arrives in Vancouver. She's tough, particularly on Pon Man's wife, Siu Sang, who suffers postpartum depression. The present ceaselessly mirrors the past in this enlightening look at Vancouver's slice of the Chinese diaspora.
