March-April 2026 On the Same Page Selection
What happens when immigration laws leave generations of men cut off from family, home and a sense of belonging? In Orphan Bachelors, Fae Myenne Ng draws on her childhood in San Francisco’s Chinatown to tell an intimate immigrant story shaped by the Chinese Exclusion era. Through memories of her parents and the isolated men who surrounded them, Ng reveals how policy becomes personal, shaping identity, responsibility and survival. Blending memoir with social history, she offers a compassionate meditation on inheritance, resilience and the long emotional afterlife of exclusion.
Fae Myenne Ng is the author of the award-winning memoir Orphan Bachelors, winner of the California Book Awards Gold Medal for Nonfiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in Nonfiction. She is also the author of the novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock. Her work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic and Ploughshares, and anthologized in Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and The Pushcart Press. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and teaches creative writing and literature in UC Berkeley’s Department of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies.
Fae will be in conversation with Ben Fong-Torres on April 30.
Ben Fong-Torres was an editor and writer at Rolling Stone (and a real-life character in Almost Famous). While at the magazine, he was a Sunday DJ on KSAN-FM. He has published ten books, including his memoir, The Rice Room: Growing Up Chinese American. He co-anchored telecasts of the Chinese New Year on KTVU for 24 years, winning five Emmys. He earned an honorary doctorate from the California State University Board of Trustees and is the subject of a documentary, Like a Rolling Stone. He is a DJ on www.MoonaliceRadio.com.
This program is sponsored by Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.
“Intimate and evocative… Ng’s grace as a storyteller makes it possible to understand in one’s bones how heartless policy bends and misshapes lives for generations.”—BookPage
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