Oh My Mother!

April 1, 2023
A memoir in essays about the author's relationship with her mother and their travels together. From long road trips to a Magic Mike live show in Las Vegas to a trip to visit family in China, Wang explores several themes familiar to immigrant memoirs: practicality and frugality, wonder at America's bounty and beauty, fear of becoming easy prey for scams, and a search for belonging and relief in invisibility. The author balances entertaining fashion and other allusions gleaned from TV and her time as a reporter and editor at Refinery29 with piercing cultural observations. These insights are incisive and almost reverent, perhaps only possible from "new Americans newly inhabiting the middle class." Wang makes clear that she collaborated closely with her mother, Qing, whom she describes as a "tiger mom with a temper," and even gave her editing power. "This is our memoir--a long personal essay, if you will--and it was forged through shared fact-checking," writes the author. "Qing was the first person to read each chapter as it was written, and she is this book's first editor. Every word you read here has first passed under her red pen." Restricted to earlier chapters, Qing's storied wrath and personal background become somewhat dulled, and brief discussions of such elements as a precarious family dynamic leave readers searching for a missed reference. While this structure reduces some of the narrative tension, it is a strong, refreshing counterpoint to the story of immigrant suffering that Qing insists Americans prefer. Eschewing voyeurism for an empathetic, nuanced study of a subject never fully revealed, Wang drives to the heart of how a daughter comes to know her mother as someone with a life beyond motherhood. Readers will finish the book hoping that this mother-daughter pair will continue to collaboratively inch toward some of the things left veiled or otherwise unsaid in this collection. A creative and entertaining shared memoir of identity, place, and their indelible connection to each other.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 15, 2023
Journalist and fashion editor Wang, whose globe-trotting career blossomed during a time of rich personal-essay writing, often found herself returning to the subject of her mother, despite that "to write about your mom, especially if it's your job to write, is to reveal that you have nothing much to write about in the first place." Wang calls this collection of travel essays her and Qing's shared memoir: her attempt to understand her fascination and maybe see her mother fully, finally. In Wang's family's first years in the U.S. after immigrating from China, road trips meant freedom. Later, an unprecedented splurge on a timeshare took them to resorts in Canc�n and Hawaii, and gave Qing a reason to remind the collegeage author that she wasn't so much better than everyone else. In Disney World, Wang brings her mom to tears; in Vegas, to the live show based on one of Qing's favorite movies, Magic Mike XXL. On a trip to China in February 2020, mother and daughter take the news of a so-called pandemic differently. This charming joint memoir, fact-checked by Qing, is by turns hilarious and touching, and defined by Wang's loving refusal to take her mother, and anything about her, for granted.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.