Customer Reviews

Monkey King

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Readers of Journey to the West (a.k.a. Monkey) will find this book interesting for the way she subverts the popular Chinese literary figure in order to critique both Chinese and New England culture. The heroic characters of the Monkey tales are turned upside-down, suggesting the darker side of the tradition and its effects on women. Fans of Monkey and his colleagues may be upset by Chao's inversion of these characters, but for students of Asian America, the book presents an intriguing meditation on the effects of lingering Chinese patriarchy upon Chinese American women.

I just finished Monkey King and I have to say it's one of the best and most original books I've ever read. Patricia Chao has an incredible talent of bringing the reader along on the protagonist's journey so that you feel like you're experiencing every emotion, sound and touch first-hand. I think this was particularly important since the protagonist, Sally, is an artist and her senses are naturally acute. I was impressed that Chao did not make Sally paralyzed by her depression. Rather, I perceived Sally as emotionally stunted by her childhood trauma, but through intense self-analysis was finally able to play "emotional catch-up." I also really appreciated how Chao captured Sally's hunger for parental approval, a theme that most people can identify with regardless of their age or station in life.

This thoughtful debut novel by Patricia Chao entitled Monkey King tells the story of 28-year-old artist Sally Wang's struggle to believe that "life is exquisite."

Patricia Chao is a sensitive and intelligent writer. So when Sally finds her salvation, she finds it not in a man's arms, not in her culture, not even with her damaged family; instead, she finds salvation to be something she must embark upon on her own.

This book is immersive. I picked it up and didn't put it down for the six hours it took me to read it. It's well-written, in a sort of matter-of-fact style that lets you inside the narrator's head with the saccharine melodrama that tends to be enemy number one in this genre.

The characters are extremely well fleshed out, and you end up really caring about (and being somewhat exasperated with) the narrator.

It just generally kicks butt.

Although the writing is wonderful, the content leaves you wondering what is missing. The big messy secret in Sally's life is the nature of her relationship with her late father. This is always hovering in the background and is obviously one of the roots of her current problems. However, there is little substance in how she works these problems out

Monkey King was recommended to me by someone who had noticed that I liked memoir-style writing. Written in the first person, the novel explores the relationships that Sally, the protagonist, has with her mother, sister, grandmother, aunt and uncle, and of course, father. The portions of the book dealing with Sally's mental illness are very real, quite frightening, in fact. For some reason, the detail that Sally's handwriting became illegible as she slipped closer and closer to becoming completely unhinged really stuck with me. The relationships that Sally has with her family members are quite complex, as those things tend to be, I suppose, and the end of the novel offers no resolution, so I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone who likes their ending nicely packaged. This is one of those books, I think, that affects its reader in slight, sneaky ways. Little bits come floating back to you now and then as you make your own way through life. As with any book that deals with difficult topics, it's not as easy to write a review. It wasn't a joyous read, or a "satisfying" one, per se, but compelling and well-crafted.

In the book Monkey King we are not only treated to the relationship of sisters, mother and daughter, but also at the crossing of one culture to another. The writing is good, the main character is very real, and overall I enjoyed the book very much. It is not often that a person with a certain mental inbalance can bounce back and live a so called normal life with her family. I do recommend it.

Monkey King starts off as a well-written and interesting novel about a young, suicidal Chinese-American woman. But things begin to go very wrong. The feeling of things unexplained is not maintained long enough, the characters begin to seem very one-dimensional,and the story itself just doesn't seem to warrant the telling. Patricia Chao has potential, but it seems that this book just changed horses in midstream. I would give the first part a 9 and the secnd part a 2 so that averages out to the above rating. I hope this author tries again!

At the start of "Monkey King," twentysomething graphic artist Sally Wang is sent to a psychiatric facility, after an aborted suicide attempt. Once there, she will continue the work begun in therapy: facing the incest that destroyed her youth and confronting her mother and sister about their denial, as her father has since passed on. Sally takes the reader back to her experience as a Chinese American daughter of immigrant parents, both of whom suffered culture shock on their arrival to the U.S. Helped by a sympathetic therapist, other family members and friends, Sally slowly puts her life back together.

The author brings alive what it is like to be a young Chinese American girl whose parents are struggling to assimilate. She also handles the topic of incest with tact and sensitivity. However, one thing that bothered me was the amount of compliments and praise showered on the heroine. The sister, who witnesses the abuse and feels overshadowed by Sally, complains about this, and I started to think she had a point. Given such abundance of love, Sally did begin to seem a bit self pitying after awhile. Also, the portrayal of being a mental patient seemed more like what would happen in the sixties than in today's insurance-conscious world.

One of the most difficult things to portray in fiction has to be the disintegration of the self, as occurs in mental illness. Patricia Chao succeeds in telling a story through the eyes of one suffering a lengthy nervous breakdown, while at the same time rendering wonderful characterizations of the protagonist's Chinese-American family. While most of the writing is fairly straightforward, there are some really beautiful passages that verge on the poetic, without overdoing it.

Unlike much of the new wave of Asian-American literature, this book transcends the simple new-immigrant-in-America ground that can make this genre one-dimensional. And despite the grim subject matter, the book rises above the usual "downer" mood of most novels discussing mental illness, child abuse, etc. -- it is not sociology, it is art.

When incest and other tragedies occur, it is very easy to point the finger at someone. This book to me was ultimately compassionate and uplifting because it presented the problem within a portrait of full human complexity. I won't give away the ending but I will say it was very moving. I would love to see this story as a film.