Event Description
Porter Square Books: Boston Edition and GrubStreet are delighted to present the latest installment of the Grubbie Debut event series, welcoming Margaret Woo for the release of The City of Jade Trees. Alysia Abbott will join Woo in conversation.
ABOUT THE CITY OF JADE TREES
An eloquent chronicle of the fortunes of four generations of one family, whose lives intertwine with pivotal moments in U.S. immigration and Chinese American history
"I have made you a fish, now you must find water." As family lore has it, Margaret Woo's great-great-grandmother spoke these words to her son before he left for America in the 1880s. She had sold her only water buffalo to pay for the steam ship ticket, knowing that in sending him in search of a better life, she might never see him again. With these words, she set in motion an odyssey spanning four generations.
The City of Jade Trees is Woo's family's story, beginning with her great-grandfather, an early "sojourner," and her grandfather, whose arrival coincided with the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and continuing with her father, a trained navigator in the Flying Tigers, and her mother, the privileged daughter of a member of the infamous Green Gang. By the time Woo stepped foot on American soil at the age of seven to join her family, who now ran a Chinese restaurant, it was during a rare welcoming window of immigration reform.
Illuminating the greater arc of Chinese American history and the history of immigration to the United States, The City of Jade Trees is a powerful, moving story of each generation of a family forced to negotiate their own identity as they leave all that they know behind for a future they cannot yet see.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND CONVERSATION PARTNER
Margaret Woo is a professor of law at Northeastern and a former fellow of Radcliff's Bunting Institute. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, among others, and is on the Senior Scholar Roster for the Fulbright Scholars Program. The author lives in Boston.
Alysia Abbott's work has appeared in Real Simple, Salon, and TheAtlantic.com. She is a graduate of the New School's MFA program and was a contributing producer at WNYC radio. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her family.