Associate Professor of English Jane Wong’s new memoir, “Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City,” was published in May to rave reviews from outlets such as the New York Times Book Review (“[Wong] paints her story with flourish”), Publisher’s Weekly (“ Delightful … this is a winner”) and Kirkus Reviews (“Lyric energy bursts from almost every sentence”).
“Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City” is the funny, insightful, heartbreaking and joyful take of the immigrant-family experience in the 1980s in the book's namesake town, where the real Atlantic City lies just a block or two away from the glitz of the boardwalk and the casinos. It’s in this setting that Wong details growing up inside her parent’s Chinese restaurant, from sneaking naps on bags of rice to struggling to understand why her mother gave her an “American” name in what she described in the book as “the language of the colonizer.”
"Growing up in a restaurant was like a playground for a budding poet." Read our conversation with Jane Wong in Western Today >>
More reviews
Washington Post: A furious, joyful memoir of working-class New Jersey and the writing life.
New York Times: Two Memoirs of Chinese American Hunger, Three Decades Apart
Kirkus Reviews: A generous, steaming stew of a book loaded with personality and originality and sprinkled with the fiery chili of rage.
