Maizy Chen's Last Chance
Lisa Yee
Maizy Chen is an ordinary twelve-year-old girl living near Los Angeles. She also happens to be Chinese-American, but this fact has not been terribly important to her life in the past. She is the only child of a successful single mother. One summer her mother takes her off to the little town of Last Chance, Minnesota, where Maizy's grandmother and grandfather own and run a restaurant called the Golden Palace. Maizy is drawn into the life of Last Chance and the operation of the Golden Palace. Simultaneously, her grandfather tells her stories of her family -- how his grandfather (Maizy's great-great-grandfather) came to the USA during the California Gold Rush, worked on the railroad, and eventually became a successful restauranteur in Last Chance. During that time the Golden Palace became a sort of haven for Chinese Immigrants trying to make lives in the USA.
As I read Lisa Yee's Maizy Chen's Last Chance it felt familiar to me. I recently read Ken Liu's All the Flavors (in the collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories) and Kelly Yang's Front Desk. All the Flavors is a story about the Chinese community in Idaho (which historically had one of the largest Chinese immigrant communities of the United States.) Front Desk is about a modern Chinese family who comes to the USA and takes on the management of a motel.
Together, Front Desk and All the Flavors cover similar subjects to Maizy Chen's Last Chance. But they are, in my opinion better. The stories are better and better told. Yang's Mia Tang is, to my taste, a more interesting character than Yee's Maizy Chen, and Liu's Logan (Lao Guan) is more fascinating to me than Maizy's grandfather.
Now, I am in some mental conflict here. There is a part of me that thinks, "You should not rate Maizy Chen's Last Chance relative to other stories about the same subject. If it's a good book, then give it a good rating!" But there's also a part of me that replies, "Why not? In reality, every book I read is a choice -- I don't have time to read all the books I want to. If nothing else, Front Desk and All the Flavors suggest it could be done better." Thus three stars -- my "I'm not sorry I read this" rating.
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