China Boy

Kai Ting is the only American-born son of an aristocratic Mandarin family that has fled China in the wake of Mao's revolution. Woefully unprepared for life on the streets of San Francisco and speaking a patchwork of Chinese and English that no one but his relatives comprehend, Kai spends a blissful early childhood with his sophisticated older sisters and his wonderfully eccentric mother. But Kai's idyll comes to an abrupt end with his mother's death. Suddenly plunged into American culture by his new stepmother, a Philadelphia society woman who tries to erase every vestige of China from the household, young Kai desperately searches for somewhere to belong. Warm, funny, and deeply moving, China Boy is a brilliantly rendered novel of family relationships, culture shock, and the perils of growing up in an America of sharp differences and shared humanity.