Moving fluidly across the twentieth century, Disappearing Moon Cafe traces four generations of the Wong family in Vancouver’s Chinatown, centered around the family’s largest and most chaotic restaurant. The story is pieced together by Kae Ying Woo, a contemporary narrator trying to unpack a tangled web of family secrets, forced marriages, adultery, racism, and deep-seated cultural taboos. Through her ancestors’ trials and her own personal evolution, Kae uncovers the devastating cost of survival and assimilation under the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Ultimately, unearthing these hidden histories gives Kae the strength to shatter her community’s ‘great wall of silence,’ choose a liberating queer relationship, and reclaim her own autonomy.
Details
| ISBN: 9781878067111 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Historical Fiction; Asian Interest; Canadian Eh |
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| Publication Date: 1991-09-01 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Seal Press |
| Language: English |
| Format: Hardcover |
| Pages: 237 |
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| Notes: Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) is a celebrated multi-generational historical novel by Chinese-Canadian writer SKY Lee (originally published by Douglas & McIntyre and later reprinted by Seal Press). The author is an openly lesbian writer and activist whose work is heavily tied to Canadian queer and intersectional feminist literature. Crucially, the text itself explicitly qualifies as the modern-day framing narrator, Kae Ying Woo, ultimately chooses to leave her husband to pursue a life with her lesbian lover, breaking the cycles of silent heterosexual trauma that plagued the generations of women before her. |
| Book_ID: 107981 |