Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

March 1, 2023
A poet's memoir about her working-class childhood, writing career, family, and Asian American identity. Despite the fact that Wong's father gambled away the family's Chinese restaurant in New Jersey when she was still quite young, the feeling of being a "restaurant baby" is central to this book. "I am that person who thinks that the compost bin is beautiful, in all its swirls of color (jade mold, chocolate slime--why is no one hiring me to name nail polish?), surprising texture, and piquant death," she writes. After her father lost the restaurant and left the family, her mother became a postal worker, sorting mail overnight into and through the pandemic. If there is a single topic that unifies the book, it's her mother. A series of passages labeled "wongmom.com" imagines that her mother's wisdom might be available online, including things like her take on an "ancient Chinese saying"--"If you can't crawl, swim. If you can't swim, then take the bus." Wong's sharp sense of humor is fueled by a healthy dose of righteous anger, and her lyric energy bursts from almost every sentence. In the chapter titled "Bad Bildungsroman With Table Tennis," she writes, "Part of being a teenager is the desire to destroy something. To break something apart so fully, you can see its pulled seams, its tangled organs. At 13, I felt this feeling churn within me, this rage, this pim-ple-popping lusciousness of rudeness, this gleaming desire for sudden destruction." She writes candidly about her shoplifting phase, her misery at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and her disgust for bigotry and cultural appropriation. A good portion of the book focuses on finding her confidence as an Asian American poet, including the glorious moment when she was recognized with a big grant and a museum show. For this profoundly unsqueamish writer, poetry is "interior slime spicy along our tongues" and "chicken grease congealing behind my ear." A generous, steaming stew of a book loaded with personality and originality and sprinkled with the fiery chili of rage.

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Starred review from April 24, 2023
In this delightful memoir in essays, Chinese American poet Wong (How to Not Be Afraid of Everything) reflects on her experiences growing up on the Jersey Shore as the child of immigrants and later life as an English professor. In the title piece, Wong uses the image of a bank of Chinese tourist buses wending its way toward Atlantic City to set the stage for her family life: Wong’s parents operated a Chinese restaurant on the Shore, whose operations were eventually hampered by her father’s gambling addiction and alcoholism. The hilarious “Give Us Our Crowns” sees Wong’s mother entering Wong in Miss Preteen New Jersey, giving the author the opportunity to ruminate on the impact of Western beauty ideals on Chinese women. In “Bad Bildungsroman with Table Tennis,” Wong sharply recounts her father’s obsessions with Ping-Pong, including his purchase of an expensive table despite the family’s financial struggles, nimbly balancing humor and heartbreak. Wong cannily addresses racism in academia and the long arc of finding her identity as a poet in several essays, most notably in the final piece, “Astonished Enough?” in which she traces the personal and historical barriers that have stood between her and a writing career. With a poet’s ear for language and a satirist’s eye for human foibles, Wong masterfully marries her personal story with larger questions about Chinese American identity. This is a winner.

May 1, 2023
Her friend coins the term, or the wish for, Wongmom.com, "Like you could just type in what's been on your mind and press enter. It's your mom's voice, saying exactly what you need to hear." In award-winning Wong's unfiltered memoir, her mother is indeed the hero of her aching, angry, surprisingly funny portrait of a poet demanding, fighting, and eating her way to self-acceptance and earned recognition. Her mother enabled their survival when Wong's gambling-addicted, abusive father lost their New Jersey restaurant and then abandoned his family. In adulthood, other men nearly destroyed her, including the vicious Bad One and the ex-fianc� who pressured her to buy his mattress when they broke up. "They tell me I'm badass, a rebel, a brilliant one, and when they realize I actually am, they get mad and leave." Her literary coming-of-age is marked by racism and elision--"if anything, much of my formal education pushed me away from the roots of poetry"--but she persists. "I became a poet from my mother, from her own powers of lyrical divination." Long live Wongmom.com.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.