After the untimely death of his mother, young Louis Lum, a fact-checker at a hot rod magazine, decides to leave his California home and go to Hong Kong to find a long-lost uncle and, with any luck, the roots of his family. A first novel. 30,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

After the untimely death of his mother, young Louis Lum, a fact-checker at a hot rod magazine, decides to leave his California home and go to Hong Kong to find a long-lost uncle and, with any luck, the roots of his family. - (Baker & Taylor)

A hilarious and inventive first novel tracing three generations of a death-stalked Chinese-American family in Orange County, California

The Lums are cursed: ever since Grandpa Melvin was inspired to join the U.S. army after watching a Popeye movie and-as family lore has it-unleashed a "relentless rain of steel death" upon the Nazis, Lum after Lum has been doomed to an untimely demise, be it by tainted cheeseburger or speeding ice cream truck. The most recent victim is Louis Lum's mother, at the hands of a medical student asleep at the wheel. Now Louis, a fact checker at a hot rod magazine in his early twenties, must move back home with his gangsta rap-obsessed father, Sonny, to prevent him from enacting the revenge he promises. But soon Louis's concern shifts to another wayward family member, his uncle Bo Lum, who has disappeared in Hong Kong after many years of self-imposed exile. After the annual family meeting at Grandma Esther's house, Louis decides to leave his father and go to Hong Kong and find Bo, his grandmother's favorite son. As Louis' search progresses, the tragicomic story of three generations of Lums in America is revealed through the eyes of Louis, Sonny, and Grandma Esther. A novel about the unexpected ways love and myth work to both sustain and threaten family ties, A Long Stay in a Distant Land introduces a wry and original new voice in American fiction.

A hilarious and inventive first novel tracing three generations of a death-stalked Chinese-American family in Orange County, California

The Lums are cursed: ever since Grandpa Melvin was inspired to join the U.S. army after watching a Popeye movie and-as family lore has it-unleashed a "relentless rain of steel death" upon the Nazis, Lum after Lum has been doomed to an untimely demise, be it by tainted cheeseburger or speeding ice cream truck. The most recent victim is Louis Lum's mother, at the hands of a medical student asleep at the wheel. Now Louis, a fact checker at a hot rod magazine in his early twenties, must move back home with his gangsta rap-obsessed father, Sonny, to prevent him from enacting the revenge he promises. But soon Louis's concern shifts to another wayward family member, his uncle Bo Lum, who has disappeared in Hong Kong after many years of self-imposed exile. After the annual family meeting at Grandma Esther's house, Louis decides to leave his father and go to Hong Kong and find Bo, his grandmother's favorite son. As Louis' search progresses, the tragicomic story of three generations of Lums in America is revealed through the eyes of Louis, Sonny, and Grandma Esther. A novel about the unexpected ways love and myth work to both sustain and threaten family ties, A Long Stay in a Distant Land introduces a wry and original new voice in American fiction.

Chieh Chieng was born in Hong Kong and moved to Orange County, California, at the age of seven. He graduated from the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, and has been published in Glimmer Train, The Threepenny Review, and the Santa Monica Review. He is twenty-nine years old.

Booklist Reviews

/*Starred Review*/ Chieng's fearless first novel explores three generations of a Chinese American family and the forces that shape their fate. From a poisonous cheeseburger to a plunge from a precarious cliff, the surfeit of casualties suffered by the Lum clan of Orange County, California, hardly seems like coincidence (could it be payback for Grandpa Melvin's service in World War II, inspired, as it was, by a Popeye cartoon?) So when Melvin's adult grandson, Louis, learns of his father's determination to avenge his wife's untimely demise (she was killed by a sleep-deprived medical student who should have never climbed behind the wheel), he moves back in with his old man to prevent him from doing something he'll regret. Father and son make a curious domestic pair. Louis lives a quiet life as a fact-checker at a local hot rod magazine; his father sips malt liquor and listens to "gangsta rap." Soon, Louis' grandmother Esther (the Chinese equivalent of a Jewish mother) gathers the family to discuss the latest drama: the disappearance of Louis' reclusive uncle, Bo, who has been living in Hong Kong. Life lessons await Louis, who travels to Hong Kong determined to find Bo. This is a dazzling debut: poignant, prickly, and deliciously absurd. ((Reviewed February 15, 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

Tired of overstuffed family sagas? How about a family saga lite? That's what Chieng, spoofing the genre, offers in his debut.Tongue-in-cheek, Chieng starts with a family tree, dated 2002, of the Lums, a Chinese-American clan in California. This is a tree with many fallen limbs. Our quasi-protagonist, 23 year-old Louis, lists six dead Lums in his lifetime-ah, those freak accidents! The latest death is that of his mother, in a head-on collision, and father Sonny is hell-bent on a revenge killing of the other driver, an exhausted hospital resident asleep at the wheel. It's Louis's mission to stop his father's project; his other mission is to ease his grandmother Esther's anxiety by tracking down his reclusive Uncle Bo. With these two frail storylines, Chieng, skipping around chronologically, passes over key moments of the standard immigrant saga: the Lums' arrival in the US, say, or their later move from San Francisco's Chinatown to the white suburbs of Orange County. He does show the racial consciousness of the Lums after Pearl Harbor, when the family tries but fails to dissuade Louis's stubborn grandfather Melvin from enlisting in the white man's war. But by 2002, the Lums are completely assimilated. They speak with a sitcom snap, Louis worships at Wal-Mart and Target, Sonny is crazy for rap music. Skewering racial stereotyping, Chieng makes Hersey Collins, that sleepy hospital resident, a black man unacquainted with rap music. The avenging Sonny lets him off the hook when Hersey accepts a rap record in a denouement a little too cute. As for Uncle Bo, he'd found his family overwhelming and escaped to Hong Kong. His mother still adores him, but unconditional love can be crushing: that's the lesson Bo has for Louis when uncle and nephew finally meet.Chieng's deadpan playfulness works for and against him: it draws the reader in at first, but then its brittleness gets in the way of full identification with his characters. Still, on the whole, a promising debut.Agent: Dorian Karchmar/Lowenstein-Yost Associates Copyright Kirkus 2005 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

Chieng chronicles three generations of the comically ill-fated Chinese-American Lum family in his whimsical debut. Ever since Grandpa Melvin defied family wishes by enlisting during WWII, the Lums have been cursed by untimely deaths. Living in suburban Orange County, Calif., certainly doesn't protect them from wayward ice cream trucks and E. coli-laced burgers. So when the certified hermit of the family, Uncle Bo-who escaped the suffocating grip of his mother's love by moving to Hong Kong-stops returning her regular form letters, which ask questions like "Do you always plan on waking up the next day?" Grandma Esther suspects the worst. Grandson Louis decides to take a much-needed sabbatical from his father, Sonny-who comforts himself with rap music while calling for revenge on the overtired medical student who crashed into his wife's car and killed her-by traveling to Hong Kong to look for his uncle. Though Uncle Bo's plight remains central, the novel adheres to no strict narrative structure; it dips in and out of the Lum family over the course of half a century, treating readers to delectable nibbles of zany family lore and conjectural genealogies stretching back centuries. Charmingly eccentric and refreshingly unstereotypical, the novel still suffers a bit from its dibs and dabs construction, which can make the story feel too slick to be satisfying. Agent, Dorian Karchmar. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.