Beyond the Narrow Gate: The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America [Hardcover]

Leslie Chang (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1999

An epic of four Chinese women and their journey from East to West. When the Communists took over mainland China, among the many that were forced to flee their homeland were four remarkable women. Arriving in Taiwan in 1948, Dolores, Suzanne, Margaret, and Mary met at the elite First Girls School, the "narrow gate" where a lucky few could become eligible for U.S. visas. In this refuge, their characters were built, their friendships were formed, and their eyes were focused on the future--a life in America, where their paths would diverge dramatically. But this group portrait does not end once the women reach America. Beyond the Narrow Gate chronicles the struggles and hardships the women faced in their new country and breaks new ground by taking readers outside of Chinatown into diverse communities and families, effectively re-drawing the map of Asian America. The daughter of one of her subjects, journalist Leslie Chang weaves her own personal story as a second-generation Chinese American into her narrative, illuminating generational differences and conflicts. She unflinchingly examines the experience of feeling like a stranger in both the white and Chinese communities, the constraints of parental expectations, and the complexity of interracial relationships. Impeccably researched, beautifully written, Beyond the Narrow Gate is an unforgettable epic of American immigration, a true story as riveting as any novel.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Chinese this century have endured traumas inconceivable to modern Western generations. Beyond the Narrow Gate is the story of four girls who fled extreme violence, privation, and the Communist Red Army in 1948. Author Leslie Chang hoped to uncover the family history that her mother, one of the girls, was unwilling to talk about and learn her own identity in the process. The gulf between their experiences is profound. As Chang says of her orphaned mother, "At thirteen, she had learned to expect only the worst from life; at thirteen, I thought the greatest tragedy was losing a contact lens." Chang's tale weaves together several themes: her mother's passage from Chinese student to American housewife; the varied experiences of three friends her mother made at an elite girls' school in Taiwan; the mother-daughter relationship; and growing up in an alien culture.

Chang brings great empathy, passion, and descriptive elegance to this important book about the contemporary immigrant experience, exploring territory opened up to us by Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. When the book ends with mother and daughter celebrating Chinese New Year in Taiwan, we share in the understanding that enables them to sit quietly with the ancient aunt who took advantage of the mother when she was a defenseless teenager. For the first time, Chinese celebrations hold meaning for Leslie Chang. --John Stevenson

From Publishers Weekly

Sketching the lives of four Chinese womenAher mother and her mother's three classmates from Taiwan's most prestigious high schoolAChang earnestly attempts to discern how they survived the transition from China to Taiwan in 1948 and then to the U.S., where they married or pursued careers, resisting and yielding to American culture in varying degrees. As the author writes, "only in America could their choices and circumstances have carried them to such different futures even as the past continued to connect them." Chang's own story involves the refusal of the immigrating generation to grant the subsequent generation full knowledge of the past. She tells convincingly of her frustration with both the content of the women's stories and the manner in which they were told, and of the inevitable conflicts of living an American life occasionally pierced by the tragedy of the Chinese civil war, which her mother barely survived. Chang's novelistic portrayals may leave readers wondering how much she has blurred the line between fiction and journalism, and are occasionally at odds with the more straightforward passages of exposition. Some of the questions Chang poses show her to be as American as anyone who might have written this book (at one point, she describes Mao as "panda-like"). Still, her account may help ground those who don't know the tale of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, and offers an appealingly intimate portrait of how an educated Chinese class has attempted to preserve itself. Agent, Mary Evans.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult (May 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525942572
• ISBN-13: 978-0525942573
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,404,161 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone born between 1935-1975 should read this book, March 1, 2000

By 

Greer Tan Swiston (West Newton, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Narrow Gate: The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America (Hardcover)

Leslie Chang as elegantly put into print the experience of my parents' generation. I, too, am a second generation American Born Chinese. I don't believe my parents intentionally hid their past from us, but with the language and cultural differences, the picture wasn't always so clear. But it all seems so much clearer now, having read Leslie's book ... and I consider myself nearly fluent in spoken Mandarin. The book has been instrumental in helping my parents and I to talk about our experiences even more. Her meticulous description of her mother in the booth trying on all those shoes ... was so graphic, so clear and so real ... I could hear the crowd whispering. It was little scenes like that, which really brought the reality of it all home ... that this happened to real people. This book talks more about the China, the Chinese and the life that I and many of the other American Born Chinese (ABC) friends that I'd grown up with are familiar with. I've been waiting for a book that shared my feelings, experience and thoughts and I feel that I have found it here. Thank you, Leslie, for all your research and your magic pen!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Has a greater ring of "truth" than Joy Luck Club, August 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Beyond the Narrow Gate: The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America (Hardcover)

I read this narrative in a matter of hours because I could not put it down. Sometimes poignant, sometimes bittersweet, sometimes funny, but always riveting, Beyond the Narrow Gate is a brave exploration of the Chinese immigrant experience based mainly on the art of survival and forgetting.

It is hard to imagine today that ancien regime Nationalist China was about as opposite as modern day America in the 50s could get. These women simply did not come thousands of miles from another continent, they practically came from a another planet with the great differences in cultural attitudes, values and expectations yet not only survived, but endured and even prospered with a unique blend of stoic pragmatism. The down side of this pragmatism was a complete divorce between their previous life in China and subsequent life in America that mirrored the issues of their children.

The narrative underscores the impact of the first generation upon the second, the options "jook sing" must make between the China that exists through the influence of their parents and their subjective experience as Americans. Leslie Chang's courageous journey from rejection to acceptance of her natal culture is often painful, revealing human weaknesses and unimaginable responses in the face of impending tragedy. Memory and survival are strange bedfellows. I doubt that few of us would have her integrity in seeking out the darkest recesses of their parents' closet without flinching.

Despite the recent spate of pop psychoanalytical memoirs, Leslie's narrative is all the more powerful for the revelation of sealed off rooms of painful memory for Nationalist Chinese immigrants, most, if not all are unwilling to revisit. Their stoic Confucian attitudes do not allow them to bemoan what fate gave them, but to constantly look forward to the future. Looking backwards at closed chapters of life is not only considered uninstructive, but destructive. They passed on a patrimony was often the good life in America for their children but not of their own past.

Incisively written with a wealth of anecdotal detail, all of the stories converge into a final poignant scene - Leslie and Wei making dumplings for Chinese New Years like their parents before them and the generations before that. The spare prose handles the disjointed lives sensitively with a ring of unmistakable truth. The references to poet Wallace Stevens, a man who had a less than fulfilling life himself, are a nice touch. Bravo!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An insightful and engrossing attempt to understand parents., July 5, 1999

By 

"gatto_tristano_cinese" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Narrow Gate: The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America (Hardcover)

Leslie Chang's book moved me and echoed so many of my own sentiments as an adult child of immigrants. I bought this book as a 65th birthday present for my mother. I ended up inhaling it in three late night "peeking at the book you bought for someone else" sessions. Her observations, thorough research, honest prose, and intuitive insights reveal her as both a scalpel sharp journalist and an imperfect, caring human being who struggles with the ongoing process of figuring out how to relate to parents who speak a different language, literally and psychically.

Chang speaks of resentment and annoyance at her mother but admits that she loves and appreciates her often-overbearing mother. Did Chang secretly listen in on my private psychotherapy sessions? I've wrestled my whole life with the loneliness that I so often feel as the child of parents who will never understand that much of me or see me for who I think I really am. I feel a little less alone because writers like Leslie Chang are able to engage in candid and fair examinations of our parents who so often feel like aliens. At an author's reading night that I attended in Berkeley, Leslie Chang showed up with her mother. She shared with the audience that her mother had not read the book yet, but had bought a thousand copies. That is so Chinese! Chang took risks here. One of the women profiled in the book is angry with Leslie for the way she is portrayed. One brother has read only twenty pages. The other said, "what's the point?" Chang confessed that she never wants to write a book involving family members again. I'm glad she wrote this book. I highly recommend this book not just to adult children of immigrants, but to anyone who wrestles with issues of loneliness, conditional love, personal disappointment, irreconcilable differences, survival, and belonging.