Disappearing Moon Cafe

Disappearing Moon Cafe

Kelvin Liang

Face

• Face, in Chinese culture, is the equivalent to prestige/dignity/reputation in English.

Chapter Summary:

• In traditional Chinese families, "face" is something that determines the social status of a particular family among other Chinese families. Certain actions (or sometimes inactions) such as a son becoming a doctor or a daughter/bride failing to conceive may add to or deduce from a family's "face".

In Disappearing Moon Cafe an example on something can can increase "face" can be found on (p.46): "All the customs and tradition fulfilled even in these hard times; no propriety omitted, giving our parents great face!"

• The text included in class is the first chapter: Waiting for Enlightenment.

Important Ideas

The Book

Old traditions vs. modern ways

"... Everything here is so 'ultramodern.' You don't know what that means, but every here likes that ghost word. It means the best and the newest." (p.42)

New:

The West

• Impression of independence, but in reality is closer to isolation.
• Riches to be found.

Old:

The East

• Emphasis on family over individual.
• Families that referred to themselves as clans and overall had extremely strong bonds within the group.
• No promises for wealth

• The idea of "Face"
• Old traditions vs. modern ways
• Female roles in the family and community

Female roles in the family and community

1- Kae Ying Woo is a woman waiting for enlightenment. She “has been told that it is important to keep a family strong and together” (p.26) Nobody had warned her how hard it was to have a baby when it was her time to have one. When the baby boy, Robert Man Jook Lee, is born, Woo's mother tells her about her great-grandmother, Lee Mui Lan.

2- Lee Mui Lan worked at the Disappearing Moon Cafe, controlling the place as tyrannical matriarch. Her husband was Wong Gwei Chang ,and they often had trouble communicating. Mui Lan explained that she wanted her son Wong Choy Fuk, and her daughter in law, Chan Fong Mei, to have a child for the Wong family.

3- Kae Ying Woo’s is with her roommate, Hermia Chow. Kae shows her grandmother’s (Chan Fong Mei) letters describing her life in Canada to Hermia.

4- Chan Fong Mei feels like she is being put in a hopeless situation, “squashed under her mother-in-law’s big thumb” (p.72) because she and Choy Fuk do not have children yet. She crumbles under the pressure and yells at her friend Ting An, a worker in the cafe.

Female roles in the family and community: Relationships

Mui Lan vs. Fong Mei

Mui Lan (the matriarch/mother-in-law)

• unsatisfied and sour because of Fong Mei, her daughter-in-law, still did not produce a baby after five years of marriage.
• relies on her husband for her identity "merchant's wife" 28
• see daughters-in-law as less than useful because she did not produce children.
• "And Mui Lan's nightmare was loneliness. She arrived and found only silence... Without her soicety of women, Mui Lan lost substance. Over the years, she became bodiless, or was it soulless, and the only way she could come back was by being noisy and demanding..." p.26

Fong Mei

• Oppressed by her mother-in-law
• Unhappy because she is ignored by her husband and tormented by Mui Lan
• Isolated from her family in China
• Low social status (daughter-in-law plus the fact that she has not been able to produce children.)

Disappearing Moon Cafe

• Published in 1990
• won the 1990 City of Vancouver Book Award
• a finalist in the 1990 Governor General's Award
• Nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize

The Title

Cippled, partial, incomplete

References

Author- Sky Lee

• http://sweetmarielovestoread.blogspot.tw/2012/03/disappearing-moon-cafe.html
• http://www.writework.com/essay/brief-book-review-sky-lee-s-novel-disappearing-moon-cafe-d
• http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/canada/sky.html

Moon

Building, tower, level

• Born in 1952 in Port Alberni, British Columbia

• Has published both feminist fiction and non-fiction and identifies as lesbian

Outline

• Has published two books as a professional writer: Disappearing Moon Cafe and Bellydancer

Tong lau

Cafe

Yueyang Tower

• Introduction
• Summary
• Important Ideas