Midnight at the Dragon Cafe (Bates)

Midnight at the Dragon Cafe 
Judy Fong Bates, 2005
Counterpoint
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781582431895


Summary 
Set in the 1960s, Judy Fong Bates’s much-talked-about debut novel is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a small Ontario town’s solitary Chinese family, whose life is changed over the course of one summer when she learns the burden of secrets. Through Su-Jen’s eyes, the hard life behind the scenes at the Dragon Cafe unfolds.

As Su-Jen’s father works continually for a better future, her mother, a beautiful but embittered woman, settles uneasily into their new life. Su-Jen feels the weight of her mother’s unhappiness as Su-Jen’s life takes her outside the restaurant and far from the customs of the traditional past. When Su-Jen’s half-brother arrives, smouldering under the responsibilities he must bear as the dutiful Chinese son, he forms an alliance with Su-Jen’s mother, one that will have devastating consequences.

Written in spare, intimate prose, Midnight at the Dragon Cafe is a vivid portrait of a childhood divided by two cultures and touched by unfulfilled longings and unspoken secrets. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—1949 
• Where—China
• Reared—Ontario, Canada
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Canada

Judy Fong Bates came to Canada from China as a young girl and grew up in several small Ontario towns. She is the author of a collection of short stories, China Dog, and a novel, Midnight at the Dragon Cafe. Her stories have been broadcast on CBC Radio and published in literary journals and anthologies.

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Book Reviews
The sexual crime at the center of this story is almost Sophoclean, but Bates's unpretentious prose keeps the potential melodrama in check. By the end, when Su-Jen looks back at her parents and the small, painful world they created to give her a "lucky" childhood, she realizes how truly costly their efforts were. Everyone's life, she reminds us, is a story of immigration, a bracing journey to new perspectives that make home "a distant place."
Ron Charles - Washington Post

In this deeply affecting debut novel by the author of the short story collection China Dog, intrepid Su-Jen Chou, the only daughter of parents who flee Communist China in the 1950s to become proprietors of a Chinese restaurant in an isolated Ontario town, watches as her family unravels. In Irvine, it is "so quiet you can hear the dead," and Su-Jen's mother, Jing, beautiful and bitter, laments her imprisonment in an unfamiliar country. To Jing's chagrin, Su-Jen's father, Hing-Wun, much older than his wife, believes in the traditional method for obtaining wealth: endless hard work. When Su-Jen's handsome older half-brother, Lee-Kung, comes to live with the family and help out in the restaurant, Su-Jen is happy, but soon she notices her mother and Lee-Kung exchanging veiled glances and realizes they're keeping some dangerous secret. Increasingly, Su-Jen finds herself caught between her parents, who have "settled into an uneasy and distant relationship... their love, their tenderness, they give to their daughter." She seeks relief in books and in the Chinese tales her father loves to tell, but the trouble festering comes to a head when a mail-order bride arrives for her brother. Bates conveys with pathos and generosity the anger, disappointment, vulnerability and pride of people struggling to balance duty and passion.
Publishers Weekly

When Su-Jen and her mother, Lai-Jing, left Communist China in the 1950s for Canada, they spoke no English, and Su-Jen had never met her father. In Ontario, they are the only Chinese family, set apart but for the fact that Su-Jen's father owns the local Chinese restaurant, The Dragon Cafe. Su-Jen's elderly father and beautiful young mother live unhappily as strangers, not even sleeping in the same bed. Su-Jen's mother is miserable with their poverty in this new small town. The balance of this family shifts when Su-Jen's half brother, Lee-Kung, comes to live with them and work in the restaurant. Soon Lai-Jing no longer shares her daughter's bed, as she and her stepson begin a torrid affair to which Su-Jen is the only witness. As Su-Jen's family unravels before her eyes, she is rapidly adapting to life in Canada. She becomes fluent in English; she is given the school name of Annie; and she develops friendships among the Canadian girls. The best of these friends is Charlotte, a spirited girl who behaves in a way that is older than her years. Little does Annie realize that the fate a fortuneteller predicted for her would befall her best friend. Midnight at the Dragon Cafe is a quietly lyrical coming-of-age novel about a young girl who is adapting and thriving while watching her family struggle to maintain their cultural identity as they impotently fight against racism and poverty. The writing in this novel is beautifully simple and perfectly complements the out-of-context Chinese culture, which exists at the heart of the story. The style is accessible, and although the character of Su-Jen is young, the portrayal of her disenchantment with her family as well as her awkward assimilationof Canadian culture will ring true with the older teens to whom this book might appeal. Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults.
Heather Lisowiski - KLIATT

First-novelist Bates (stories: China Dog, 2002) explores the Chinese immigrant experience in Canada in a heartbreaking but muted love story. Su-Jen Chou is seven years old in 1957 when she and her mother come from China to join her father, who has bought into a small restaurant in a town near Toronto. Su-Jen, who becomes Annie when she begins school, narrates the story of her parents' lives and her own developing awareness with an eye for the telling detail, though her understanding evolves with appropriate slowness. Annie quickly assimilates, making friends and becoming a star student, but her still young and beautiful mother, who speaks no English, is deeply unhappy, missing China, where her family had wealth and prestige before the Communist takeover. She argues constantly with Annie's elderly father, who has lived on and off in Canada for many years. The two share no affection, sleeping with Annie in the bed between them until her father eventually moves into another room. After Annie's much older brother, Lee-Kung, who has been working elsewhere in Canada, comes to help run the restaurant, Annie learns that both parents had previous marriages and children who died, that Lee-Kung is only her half-brother, and that his mother may have committed suicide. Inevitably, Annie's mother and Lee-Kung are drawn toward each other. While Annie witnesses the affair with disgust, she's also caught up in the less interesting complexities of her own pubescent life, particularly her friendship with Charlotte, one of those golden children doomed in fiction to early death. Annie's mother becomes pregnant around the same time that Lee-Kung's bride arrives for the marriage arranged at his father's insistence. Annie sees looks exchanged, hears snatches of conversation. What in lesser hands could have become overwrought remains bittersweet and elegiac as the family struggles to maintain dignity and unity. Deeply satisfying: a lovely sensuality pervades in spite of the harshness of the world Bates portrays so eloquently.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. With Midnight at the Dragon Cafe, Judy Fong Bates produces a work that is both quintessentially Canadian and yet powerfully conveys the Chinese immigrant perspective. What makes the novel feel as classically Canadian as anything by Margaret Laurence or Alice Munro? Consider setting (where the story unfolds) and character.

2. What details does Bates use to allow the reader to fully enter the particular point of view of a newly settled Chinese family? How does the mother, Lai-Jing, view her new surroundings? How does she feel about her neighbours, the lo fons (white people), of Irvine?

3. How does Su-Jen see her new community? The school, the river,the stores, her father's restaurant and her schoolmates? Are your feelings about small-town Canada modified in any way by experiencing it through the eyes of the Chou family?

4. What overt acts of racism does Su-Jen endure among her female peers? What are the more subtle forms? Consider the school play: Was it realistic or racist for Su-Jen's friends to dissuade her from auditioning for the lead role? Why? How do name-calling and racist assumptions affect Su-Jen?

5. In what ways is Su-Jen a child caught between two cultures? How does this affect her world view?

6. By what means do Su-Jen's father, Hing-Wun, mother, Lai-Jing, and Uncle Yat keep Chinese culture alive in Canada? Consider their beliefs, values, and daily activities.

7. What role do the arts—stories and music—play in the novel, particularly in the lives of Hing-Wun and Su-Jen?

8. Sacrifice is an important theme in the novel. How does each character's understanding of sacrifice affect the lives of Su-Jen's father, mother, and brother? How does Su-Jen's own understanding of sacrifice change over the course of the novel?

9. How are the events in the story influenced by the Chou family's isolation from the larger urban Chinese community?

10. Why do the Chinese characters in the novel seem so obsessed with money? Give some examples from the novel of the characters' absorption with money and status. Consider Aunt Hai-Lan and also the Chongs (the family interested in arranging a marriage for their daughter). What does this tell the reader about how the Chou family sees itself in their new home?

11. What are some of the ways in which the Chou family reveals their preoccupation with money? How do these concerns shape their lives? Are their fiscal and social concerns realistic? Is the Chou family more money conscious than their Canadian-born neighbours? To what extent are the residents of Irvine also conscious of money and status?

12. What qualities draw Su-Jen to Charlotte Heighington? What does this tell us about Su-Jen?

13. Su-Jen is attracted not only to Charlotte, but to the entire Heighington household, particularly Charlotte's mother. Why might the Heighingtons be considered odd by the rest of the town? In what ways does Mrs. Heighington differ from Su-Jen's mother? What qualities, if any, do the two women share?

14. A love affair between a married woman and her stepson would be shocking regardless of the circumstances. What makes it feel even more so in Midnight at the Dragon Café? How does the inclusion of Lai-Jing and Lee Kung's affair allow the novel to transcend the category of "immigrant story"?

15. Does the affair cause you to identify more with the family, or less? Do you sympathize with Lai-Jing's behavior? How do you feel about Lee-Kung? Is anyone to blame? Does Hing-Wun deserve a portion of the blame?

16. Did the affair cause you to question Lai-Jing's love for Su-Jen? Are these two separate but parallel kinds of love, or two competing ones? Is Lai-Jing really as trapped as she feels?

17. In what very specific ways do politics and history influence the Chou family? Consider World War I, World War II, Canada's immigration policies, and Japan's 1937 Invasion of China. Has coming to Canada freed the Chou family from its past? Is anyone ever free of the past?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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