Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

Jane Wong grew up in her family's Chinese restaurant in New Jersey (until her father's gambling obsession drove it into failure); now she's a poet and professor at Western Washington in Bellingham. But this isn't the sort of memoir that draws a bright line between an immigrant, East Coast past and an educated, assimiliated, West Coast future: It twists and turns and digresses and remembers, full of ghosts and ex-boyfriends, of dragon fruit and fish-head soup and Lunchables. And at the heart of it all is Jane's mom, still commuting an hour each way to work the USPS night shift in Jersey, and still sending daily advice from afar. Her daughter's book is a spiky, angry, hungry, silly, sweet love letter to her and a manifesto for her own love of language and her right to use it.