Disappearing Moon Cafe
was a stunning debut novel that has become a Canadian literary classic. An unflinchingly honest portrait of a Chinese Canadian family that pulses with life and moral tensions, this family saga takes the reader from the wilderness in nineteenth-century British Columbia to late twentieth-century Hong Kong, to Vancouver’s Chinatown.
Intricate and lyrical, suspenseful and emotionally rich, it is a riveting story of four generations of women whose lives are haunted by the secrets and lies of their ancestors but also by the racial divides and discrimination that shaped the lives of the first generation of Chinese immigrants to Canada.
Each character, intimately drawn through Lee’s richness of imagery and language, must navigate a world that remains inexorably “double”: Chinese and Canadian. About buried bones and secrets, unrequited desires and misbegotten love, murder and scandal, failure and success, the plot reveals a compelling microcosm of the history of race and gender relations in this country.