“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, bestselling 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 ReviewKai 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...

Kai Ting knows what it means to become an American and lose all that is Chinese. It happened to his father, a former officer in Chiang Kai-shek's army, who never came to terms with his new life in the United States. Now, as a West Point cadet in the 1960s, Kai has a golden chance both to retain his heritage and to become undeniably, gloriously American.But the Point has dangerous preconceptions about Asians, especially as the war in Vietnam escalates. Kai walks on a razor's edge...and falls into the dark pit of a cheating scandal. Suddenly, he must learn a new tribal behavior, a new etiquette. And his very survival depends on learning it fast....