Long Stay in a Distant Land

Chieh Chieng was born in Hong Kong and moved to Orange County, California, at the age of seven. He graduated from the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, and has been published in Glimmer Train, The Threepenny Review, and the Santa Monica Review. The Lums of Orange County seem to be cursed. Ever since Grandpa Melvin was inspired to join the U.S. Army after watching a Popeye movie and—as family lore has it—unleashed a "relentless rain of steel death" upon the Nazis, Lum after Lum has been doomed to an untimely demise, be it by tainted cheeseburger or speeding ice cream truck. The most recent victim is Louis Lum's mother, struck down by a medical student asleep at the wheel. Now Louis, a twenty-something fact checker at a hot rod magazine, must move back home with his gangsta-rap obsessed father, Sonny, to prevent him from enacting the revenge he promises.

But soon Louis finds himself more concerned with another wayward family member, his uncle Bo Lum, who has disappeared in Hong Kong after many years of self-imposed exile. After the annual family meeting at Grandma Esther's house, Louis decides to leave his family to go to Hong Kong and find Bo, his grandmother's favorite son. As Louis's search progresses, the tragicomic story of three generations of Lums in America is revealed through the eyes of Louis, Sonny, and Grandma Esther. A novel about the unexpected ways culture, love, and myth work to both sustain and threaten family ties, A Long Stay in a Distant Land introduces a new voice in American fiction. “Through this glancing, time-traveling series of anecdotes, Chieng follows the entire Lum clan over the last 60 years. It's a neat trick, a weightless way of handling that weightiest of subjects, ancestry. Generational sagas often read like a dreary litany: Granny suffered, Mom suffered, I suffered. On the flip side, novels celebrating family can be mawkish and one-note and overfull of adorable eccentrics. With his quiet humor and spare style, Chieng gets very close to reality, where your extended family is neither good nor bad, just one of life's immovable objects.”—Claire Dederer, The New York Times  "Chieh Chieng has clear sight and a distinctive voice, a devastating deadpan wit animated by a lively sense of what's absurd in the transitional culture he explores and in the tighter and eternal culture of family. But Mr. Chieng never forgets that the human comedy matters gravely, that the final joke is on everybody and that it's not funny."—Geoffrey Wolff, author of The Duke of Deception

"For me, Chieh Chieng's subtle wit, his clear-eyed and economical prose, and his sense of irony bring to mind most readily the work of one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers—Jim Jarmusch. And in A Long Stay in a Distant Land, Chieng has written a thoroughly enjoyable and consistently inventive first novel."—Adam Langer, author of Crossing California

"This is a whimsical, poignant book that explores the country of family as the true immigrant experience. Chieng takes us on this entertaining journey from many different points of view, some obsessive, some murderous, some wry and sarcastic, but each leading to the same destination: our place—whether we like it or not—in our immutable lineage."—Diana Wagman, author of Bump

"Reminiscent of the early work of V. S. Naipaul and Sherman Alexie. Chieh Chieng's unique voice balances a mordant humor with genuine tenderness. In weaving a tapestry of one Chinese-American family's epic struggles to assimilate in the U.S., Chieng delights in his wonderfully eccentric characters, and ultimately casts light on the universal American need that to discover where we are headed, and where we belong, we must first understand where it is we come from."—Robert Rosenberg, author of This Is Not Civilization

"With both irreverence and compassion, Chieng creates a hilarious, fast-paced narrative that never undermines his respect for his offbeat, big-hearted characters."—Aimee Phan, author of We Should Never Meet

"Chieng's fearless first novel explores three generations of a Chinese American family and the forces that shape their fate. From a poisonous cheeseburger to a plunge from a precarious cliff, the surfeit of casualties suffered by the Lum clan of Orange County, California, hardly seems like coincidence (could it be payback for Grandpa Melvin's service in World War II, inspired, as it was, by a Popeye cartoon?) So when Melvin's adult grandson, Louis, learns of his father's determination to avenge his wife's untimely demise (she was killed by a sleep-deprived medical student who should have never climbed behind the wheel), he moves back in with his old man to prevent him from doing something he'll regret. Father and son make a curious domestic pair. Louis lives a quiet life as a fact-checker at a local hot rod magazine; his father sips malt liquor and listens to 'gangsta rap.' Soon, Louis' grandmother Esther (the Chinese equivalent of a Jewish mother) gathers the family to discuss the latest drama: the disappearance of Louis' reclusive uncle, Bo, who has been living in Hong Kong. Life lessons await Louis, who travels to Hong Kong determined to find Bo. This is a dazzling debut: poignant, prickly, and deliciously absurd."—Booklist (starred review) “This apparent autobiographical novel by Chieng, who was born in Hong Kong and moved to California at age seven, is at once charming, bittersweet, and hilarious. The Lum family seem to be cursed to die young after Grandpa Melvin impulsively joins the U.S. Army to fight the Nazis, against the entire family's objections. We follow several of the Lums, witnessing changes as each generation seems more Americanized. The boys join the Boy Scouts, become spelling bee champions, and enjoy jazz, while their father, Melvin, loves rap music and can state vital statistics about many rappers! The story, which moves back and forth in time, reveals many universal truths and is easy to follow and enjoyable, despite the death toll . . . [An] outstanding work.”—Susan G. Baird, Library Journal “Tired of overstuffed family sagas? How about a family saga lite? That's what Chieng, spoofing the genre, offers in his debut. Tongue-in-cheek, Chieng starts with a family tree, dated 2002, of the Lums, a Chinese-American clan in California. This is a tree with many fallen limbs. Our quasi-protagonist, 23-year-old Louis, lists six dead Lums in his lifetime—ah, those freak accidents! The latest death is that of his mother, in a head-on collision, and father Sonny is hell-bent on a revenge killing of the other driver, an exhausted hospital resident asleep at the wheel. It's Louis's mission to stop his father's project; his other mission is to ease his grandmother Esther's anxiety by tracking down his reclusive Uncle Bo. With these two frail storylines, Chieng, skipping around chronologically, passes over key moments of the standard immigrant saga: the Lums' arrival in the US, say, or their later move from San Francisco's Chinatown to the white suburbs of Orange County. He does show the racial consciousness of the Lums after Pearl Harbor, when the family tries but fails to dissuade Louis's stubborn grandfather Melvin from enlisting in the white man's war. But by 2002, the Lums are completely assimilated. They speak with a sitcom snap, Louis worships at Wal-Mart and Target, Sonny is crazy for rap music. Skewering racial stereotyping, Chieng makes Hersey Collins, that sleepy hospital resident, a black man unacquainted with rap music. The avenging Sonny lets him off the hook when Hersey accepts a rap record in a denouement a little too cute. As for Uncle Bo, he'd found his family overwhelming and escaped to Hong Kong. His mother still adores him, but unconditional love can be crushing: that's the lesson Bo has for Louis when uncle and nephew finally meet . . . A promising debut.”—Kirkus Reviews “Chieng chronicles three generations of the comically ill-fated Chinese-American Lum family in his whimsical debut. Ever since Grandpa Melvin defied family wishes by enlisting during WWII, the Lums have been cursed by untimely deaths. Living in suburban Orange County, California, certainly doesn't protect them from wayward ice cream trucks and E. coli-laced burgers. So when the certified hermit of the family, Uncle Bo—who escaped the suffocating grip of his mother's love by moving to Hong Kong—stops returning her regular form letters, which ask questions like ‘Do you always plan on waking up the next day? Grandma Esther suspects the worst. Grandson Louis decides to take a much-needed sabbatical from his father, Sonny—who comforts himself with rap music while calling for revenge on the overtired medical student who crashed into his wife's car and killed her—by traveling to Hong Kong to look for his uncle. Though Uncle Bo's plight remains central, the novel adheres to no strict narrative structure; it dips in and out of the Lum family over the course of half a century, treating readers to delectable nibbles of zany family lore and conjectural genealogies stretching back centuries. Charmingly eccentric and refreshingly unstereotypical.”—Publishers Weekly

Booklist

Orange Country Register

Los Angeles Times

The Lums are cursed: ever since Grandpa Melvin was inspired to join the U.S. army after watching a Popeye movie and-as family lore has it-unleashed a relentless rain of steel death upon the Nazis, Lum after Lum has been doomed to an untimely demise, be it by tainted cheeseburger or speeding ice cream truck. The most recent victim is Louis Lum's mother, at the hands of a medical student asleep at the wheel. Now Louis, a fact checker at a hot rod magazine in his early twenties, must move back home with his gangsta rap-obsessed father, Sonny, to prevent him from enacting the revenge he promises. But soon Louis's concern shifts to another wayward family member, his uncle Bo Lum, who has disappeared in Hong Kong after many years of self-imposed exile. After the annual family meeting at Grandma Esther's house, Louis decides to leave his father and go to Hong Kong and find Bo, his grandmother's favorite son. As Louis' search progresses, the tragicomic story of three generations of Lums in America is revealed through the eyes of Louis, Sonny, and Grandma Esther. A novel about the unexpected ways love and myth work to both sustain and threaten family ties, A Long Stay in a Distant Land introduces a wry and original new voice in American fiction.