Kai Ting

“What a knockout. An incredibly rich and new voice for American literature…China Boy grabs the reader’s heart and won’t let go.” (Amy Tan, best-selling author of The Joy Luck Club)

“A fascinating, evocative portrait of the Chinese community in California in the 1950s, caught between two complex, demanding cultures.” (The New York Times Book Review)

Kai Ting is the only American-born son of a Shanghai family that fled China during Mao’s revolution. Growing up in a San Francisco multicultural, low-income neighborhood, Kai is caught between two worlds - embracing neither the Chinese nor the American way of life. After his mother’s death, Kai is suddenly plunged into American culture by his stepmother, who tries to erase every vestige of China from the household. 

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.