United States
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Ghost Forest: A Novel
This "powerful" (BuzzFeed) award-winning debut about love, grief, and family welcomes you into its pages and invites you to linger, staying with you long after you've closed its covers.
"Quietly moving . . . connected by a kind of dream logic . . . deeply felt . . . There is joy and tenderness in . . . Fung's elegant storytelling."-The New York Times Book Review
How do you grieve, if your family doesn't talk about feelings?
This is the question the unnamed protagonist of GhostForest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong "astronaut" fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China.
As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs.
Buoyant and heartbreaking, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family.
"Ghost Forest is the tender/funny book we can all appreciate after a hellish year."-Literary Hub
"Quietly moving . . . connected by a kind of dream logic . . . deeply felt . . . There is joy and tenderness in . . . Fung's elegant storytelling."-The New York Times Book Review
How do you grieve, if your family doesn't talk about feelings?
This is the question the unnamed protagonist of GhostForest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong "astronaut" fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China.
As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs.
Buoyant and heartbreaking, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family.
"Ghost Forest is the tender/funny book we can all appreciate after a hellish year."-Literary Hub
Editorial Reviews
"This is the book I'm excited about. . . . It's about grief but it's . . . light as a feather, and it has to do with how it's arranged on the page. It's almost like reading poetry but it's a novel. . . . The words are beautiful, the writing is gorgeous, but just the way the book is laid out feels extremely refreshing."-Ann Patchett
"Ghost Forest is a debut certain to turn your heart. With a dexterity and style all her own, Pik-Shuen Fung renders the many voices that make up a family, as well as the mythologies we create for those we know, and those we wish we knew better. I am madly in love with this book, a kaleidoscopic wonder."-T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
"Here, silences speak. Brilliant and pitiless at first, Ghost Forest mutates in the reader's hand, until it shimmers with grace and unexpected humor. A mercurial meditation on love and family."-Padma Viswanathan, bestselling author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
"Made by an artist who angles her mirror to make room for the faces of others, Pik-Shuen Fung's Ghost Forest resembles a xieyi painting, a place where white space and absence are as important as color and life. Inventive, funny, and devastating."-Jennifer Tseng, award-winning author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
"Like a Chinese ink painting, every line in Pik-Shuen Fung's Ghost Forest is full of movement and spirit, revealing the resilient threads of matrilineal history and the inheritance of stories and silences. With humor, compassion, and clear-eyed prose, Fung reminds us that grief, memory, and history are never linear but always alive."-K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary
"This is a book to break your heart and then fill it to bursting again. What an exquisite, glorious debut."-Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse
"Fung's commitment to this multifaceted take on grief shines through in the moments of lightheartedness...
"Ghost Forest is a debut certain to turn your heart. With a dexterity and style all her own, Pik-Shuen Fung renders the many voices that make up a family, as well as the mythologies we create for those we know, and those we wish we knew better. I am madly in love with this book, a kaleidoscopic wonder."-T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
"Here, silences speak. Brilliant and pitiless at first, Ghost Forest mutates in the reader's hand, until it shimmers with grace and unexpected humor. A mercurial meditation on love and family."-Padma Viswanathan, bestselling author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
"Made by an artist who angles her mirror to make room for the faces of others, Pik-Shuen Fung's Ghost Forest resembles a xieyi painting, a place where white space and absence are as important as color and life. Inventive, funny, and devastating."-Jennifer Tseng, award-winning author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
"Like a Chinese ink painting, every line in Pik-Shuen Fung's Ghost Forest is full of movement and spirit, revealing the resilient threads of matrilineal history and the inheritance of stories and silences. With humor, compassion, and clear-eyed prose, Fung reminds us that grief, memory, and history are never linear but always alive."-K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary
"This is a book to break your heart and then fill it to bursting again. What an exquisite, glorious debut."-Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse
"Fung's commitment to this multifaceted take on grief shines through in the moments of lightheartedness...
Readers Top Reviews
Nurse_bookie L in
Ghost Forest is a beautifully written debut about grief and loss by Canadian writer Pik-Shuen Fung. As a Chinese American, I gravitated to this book immediately with the word “astronaut” father, where a parent who provides for the family lives and work in another country and sees his own family only once or twice a year. In this heartfelt and heartbreaking story, I resonated with a family going through loss while not being allowed to express emotions and feelings. The protagonist shares moments of her life through vignettes that were captured through conversations or memories of events – just like our own memories are only a snippet, trying to piece together to create a story, so is this novel’s type of narrative. A quiet and sparse story about a family going through grief.
muddyboy1
A nice easy to read debut novel about a family that immigrates from Hong Kong to Vancouver, Canada. It is written in small one to three page snippets. The central focus of the book is the sickness and death of the principle character's father. It also involves her mother, sister and grandmothers. We learn a lot about Oriental culture especially with regard to generational relationship, health care beliefs and funerial practices. I really liked the format with makes reading the book effortless. Nice job from a new author.
PracAdemic
I was blown away by this lovely novel - the language, the structure, how it begins being about one thing and then turns into a deeply touching story of how parents and children can be a complete mystery to each other, how we build up narratives of our lives that can be tragically skewed. I shared this with my memoir writing group (although it is a novel) b/c we often have discussions about form, what to include and not to include, how we want (or don't want) to be present in our books. I rarely really love a book but I loved this one.
MK French
Review first posted at Girl Who Reads. A free copy was provided in exchange for an honest review. The unnamed protagonist has to figure out how to grieve after her father dies, when her family doesn't discuss emotions at all. He had been an "astronaut father," staying in Hong Kong to work while the rest of the family emigrated ahead of the 1997 handover to China. This memoir is told as a series of vignettes, some from her mother or grandmother as well. We see glimpses of the lives they had in Hong Kong, in Canada, and stories from World War II in their voices. Some of the vignettes are very short, a fragment of memory, and some are longer, meandering tales with sparse details giving insight into how these women grew up and lived. The fragmented nature reflects the way immigrants can interact with the world around them. Their experiences aren't the same as those who never left Hong Kong or those that always lived in Canada. The differences in culture can be stark, and an empty ache left behind when the women don't fit in. Asian cultures don't usually verbalize their love for one another, so it's difficult for the main narrator to bridge the gap of what she was raised with between two cultures and how her father was raised. The little hurts are there, not discussed, making grief difficult to bear. This book is that journey, and we feel less of the ache as it progresses, becoming more of wistfulness and sense of belonging. It's beautifully done, and a thoughtful read.
Cariola
As they say, good things come in small packages, and this short book is absolutely stunning. The main character's family (parents, grandmother, two daughters) moved from Hong Kong to Vancouver in 1997, right before the former British Colony was transferred to Chinese administration. The father missed his job and his home city and returned the following year. He is what is known as a "helicopter father," one who shuttles back and forth between two homes. Most of the story focuses on the father's battle with liver disease and the way in which the family deals with it. But that plot line is really just a way to open the protagonist's exploration of her family's history and dynamics. Written in short chapters, the novel reads in something like a recording of what she hears from her mother, father, and grandmother and of her own internalization of events. As her father becomes increasingly ill while awaiting a liver transplant donor, she becomes increasingly aware of the distance between them, caused not so much by his absence as by the fact that it is characteristic of Chinese, especially men, to withhold their emotions. At one point, as she visits him in the hospital, she tells her father that she loves him and asks him to say it back, but he simply cannot. She realizes that she has never heard him tell her mother that he loves her either. His initial response is that he expresses his love by taking care of them, but he comes to realize eventually that it is important to express his love directly, before leaving this world. The novel is not all about death and sadness. It includes stories related by her mother and grandmother about growing up in Hong Kong, getting married, raising their children, enduring the war and other hardships. I learned a lot about Buddhism and Chinese culture as the author takes us with her through the customs of the marriage and funeral ceremonies, the remedies of traditional medicine, and more. But mostly this is the story of a family and of a young woman, born into one culture but living in another, to understand both and to find her place in each. I read this book in two days; I had difficulty putting it down to attend to necessary tasks. The writing is just achingly beautiful--so simple and yet so moving. Don't miss this one. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Short Excerpt Teaser
bird
Twenty-one days after my dad died, a bird perched on the railing of my balcony. It was brown. It stayed there for a long time.
Hi Dad, I said. Thanks for checking up on me.
I lay down on the couch and read some emails on my phone. When I looked up again, the bird was gone.
밋
In my family, the best thing a child could be was gwaai. It meant you were good. It meant you did as you were told.
When I was four, or maybe six, I found out I was supposed to have a baby brother. But my mom said the baby flew to the sky, and that was why my dad was sad those days.
But why is he sad? I asked.
Because he's a traditional Chinese father and he wants to have a son. Try to cheer him up.
Okay, I said.
I decided I would be so gwaai, I would be more perfect than a son.
astronaut family
I was three and a half when we immigrated to Canada. Like many other families, we left Hong Kong before the 1997 Handover. They say almost a sixth of the city left during this time.
My dad had seen news stories of Hong Kongers who couldn't find jobs in their new countries, stories of managers who became dishwashers because they couldn't speak the new language. Like many other fathers, my dad decided he didn't want to leave his job in manufacturing behind.
To help my mom, my grandma and grandpa agreed to move with us to Canada. That spring, my dad took two weeks off from work, and the five of us headed to Kai Tak airport. All my aunts and uncles came to the departure gates to see us off.
In Canada there were more Hong Kong immigrants than in any other country, and in Vancouver, I had many classmates whose fathers stayed in Hong Kong for work too. I didn't think of my family as different. I thought, this is what Hong Kong fathers do.
Astronaut family. It's a term invented by the Hong Kong mass media. A family with an astronaut father-flying here, flying there.
so fresh
As we walked out of the arrivals at the Vancouver airport, our family friends waved their arms.
Isn't the air so fresh in Canada? they said.
For two weeks, we stayed at their house in the Richmond neighborhood, and they drove us everywhere. We ate dim sum in Aberdeen Centre, a new mall known as Little Hong Kong, and posed for pictures in Stanley Park, feeding breadcrumbs to the geese. But mostly, we were jet-lagged, riding in the back of their beige minivan, asleep with open mouths.
Two weeks later, after we moved into our new house, they drove us back to the Vancouver airport, where my mom looked at me and said, Say bye-bye to your dad now, he's flying back to Hong Kong.
yew street
Through the windows of our new house, I saw plump pointy trees and blurry swishing trees. Everywhere outside was green.
At night, my mom slept in her bedroom, my grandpa in his. I shared a room with my grandma since we were always together. Three generations under one roof.
Dik lik dak lak diklikdaklak diklikdaklak
In our new house in Vancouver, everywhere outside was rain.
Twenty-one days after my dad died, a bird perched on the railing of my balcony. It was brown. It stayed there for a long time.
Hi Dad, I said. Thanks for checking up on me.
I lay down on the couch and read some emails on my phone. When I looked up again, the bird was gone.
밋
In my family, the best thing a child could be was gwaai. It meant you were good. It meant you did as you were told.
When I was four, or maybe six, I found out I was supposed to have a baby brother. But my mom said the baby flew to the sky, and that was why my dad was sad those days.
But why is he sad? I asked.
Because he's a traditional Chinese father and he wants to have a son. Try to cheer him up.
Okay, I said.
I decided I would be so gwaai, I would be more perfect than a son.
astronaut family
I was three and a half when we immigrated to Canada. Like many other families, we left Hong Kong before the 1997 Handover. They say almost a sixth of the city left during this time.
My dad had seen news stories of Hong Kongers who couldn't find jobs in their new countries, stories of managers who became dishwashers because they couldn't speak the new language. Like many other fathers, my dad decided he didn't want to leave his job in manufacturing behind.
To help my mom, my grandma and grandpa agreed to move with us to Canada. That spring, my dad took two weeks off from work, and the five of us headed to Kai Tak airport. All my aunts and uncles came to the departure gates to see us off.
In Canada there were more Hong Kong immigrants than in any other country, and in Vancouver, I had many classmates whose fathers stayed in Hong Kong for work too. I didn't think of my family as different. I thought, this is what Hong Kong fathers do.
Astronaut family. It's a term invented by the Hong Kong mass media. A family with an astronaut father-flying here, flying there.
so fresh
As we walked out of the arrivals at the Vancouver airport, our family friends waved their arms.
Isn't the air so fresh in Canada? they said.
For two weeks, we stayed at their house in the Richmond neighborhood, and they drove us everywhere. We ate dim sum in Aberdeen Centre, a new mall known as Little Hong Kong, and posed for pictures in Stanley Park, feeding breadcrumbs to the geese. But mostly, we were jet-lagged, riding in the back of their beige minivan, asleep with open mouths.
Two weeks later, after we moved into our new house, they drove us back to the Vancouver airport, where my mom looked at me and said, Say bye-bye to your dad now, he's flying back to Hong Kong.
yew street
Through the windows of our new house, I saw plump pointy trees and blurry swishing trees. Everywhere outside was green.
At night, my mom slept in her bedroom, my grandpa in his. I shared a room with my grandma since we were always together. Three generations under one roof.
Dik lik dak lak diklikdaklak diklikdaklak
In our new house in Vancouver, everywhere outside was rain.
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