Yeh Yeh's House: A Memoir

From Booklist
As a girl in Virginia in the 1950s, Chao corresponded with her grandfather, Yeh Yeh, a renowned poet and professor of English living in Beijing. He wrote, "You must always be yourself." But who was she? An American or the descendent of the distinguished Chinese family from which she inherited her artistic gifts? A viola player in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Chao didn't visit her relatives in China until 1987, making the pilgrimage with her often uncommunicative mother. Writing with striking directness and lucidity, Chao chronicles both unexpectedly arduous adventures and life-altering revelations. Keenly aware of the contradictions at work in this brutal and beautiful land, she exquisitely articulates the hard-won wisdom and the complex emotions inherent in the difficult lives of her kind and resilient relatives, many of whom suffered horrifically during the Cultural Revolution. Chao also discovers her mother's true self and experiences a sense of belonging she has never felt before. Utterly unaffected and yet profoundly affecting, Chao's resplendent tale of unbreakable family ties incisively illuminates the deep meaning of inheritance. Donna Seaman
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Review
"Evelina Chao's quest for her family's past--and present--is a rare addition to the classic American story of immigration and its discontents. Chao manages to capture the paradox of attraction and repulsion, comedy and heartbreak in the dislocation of cultures. She illuminates the astonishing refusal of time to erase memory even as it destroys a whole world and makes family foreigners to each other. Yeh Yeh's House is radiant, intensely moving, the fat of sentimentality utterly burned away."
- Patricia Hampl, author of A Romantic Education and I Could Tell You Stories

"Filled with lush detail and crafted with the narrative vision of a novel, Evelina Chao's memoir is a passionate and poignant tale of family, history, healing and reconciliation. Chao's graceful voice vivifies this story of a daughter's relationship with her mother and family, in both America and China. Yeh Yeh's House eloquently speaks to the responsibility and need so many of us feel to discover one's self in the context of both history and familial love. For all of us who have had to assimilate and balance dreams with expectations, this journey of self-reckoning will serve as a gratifying inspiration.
- Terrence Cheng, author of Sons of Heaven



Book Description
Growing up Chinese in Virginia in the Fifties, Evelina Chao's sense of historical or cultural context was colored by the images contained in her grandfather Yeh-Yeh's letters and news of his life as an eminent poet, philosopher, and theologian in Beijing. Her geologist father and biologist mother suffered a kind of cultural dyslexia in the American South, having fled Beijing after the Maoist Revolution in 1949. The young Evelina, foreign and isolated, believed that in China she would find the meaning of her life.

And then she found music. The rigors of training to become a professional classical musician seduced her into thinking she no longer required Yeh-Yeh's benediction, that her Chinese heritage was secondary. When Yeh-Yeh died at 92, she realized that her mythical notions of China had died with him. All that reminded her were her uncles and aunts who still lived in the family house in Beijing.

Accompanied by her mother, acting as her interpreter and all-around passport, she traveled to Beijing when China was undergoing rapid transformation following the Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s, two years before the Tiananmen uprising. Every trace of old China was being expunged, the ancient neighborhoods plowed under. Yeh-Yeh's House is a voyage of self-discovery and mother-daughter understanding set against the backdrop of a China that no longer exists.



About the Author
Evelina Chao currently holds the chair of Assistant Principal Viola with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra where she performs frequently as a soloist. She has published a novel, Gates of Grace, in 1985. She has written a series of articles for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.



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This fascinating memoir begins when Chao's grandfather Yeh Yeh, a famous English professor in China, invites her to come to China before it is too late. Unfortunately, Chao, a professional viola player, could not take time away from her music to travel to China until after her grandfather passed away at age 92. In 1987, Chao finally made the trip to Beijing, taking her mother as her guide, and discovered that her grandfather had left behind a scroll for her. Chao's quest to discover her heritage teaches her something about herself while showing her how an immigrant's culture is first uprooted and then left in pieces. She happens to have visited China during a period of rapid transformation, which provided her with a fresh perspective on her family's cultural history; visiting the place where Yeh Yeh's house once stood allows her to feel China's pulse. In the end, Chao recognizes how the Cultural Revolution has changed the course of her family and learns to accept her grandfather's blessing. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Susan McClellan, Avalon P.L., Pittsburgh Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.


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