‘Meet Me’ a memoir of Asian American life Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City: A Memoir
A memoir that celebrates as much as it grieves, rages and broods, Jane Wong’s “Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City” charts its author’s progress from the casinos of New Jersey to the college dorms of Upstate New York, to Hong Kong and Iowa and finally Bellingham, Wash., where she now teaches creative writing at Western Washington University. Composed of 12 linked essays separated by shorter, lyrical interludes on topics ranging from cyberfeminist search engines to dragon fruit to “guts,” the book catalogs the highs and lows of the literary life, turning over, at length, the joys of acceptance, the ache of rejection, the ecstasy of professional recognition and the sting of casual racism in the field. It reminds readers to treasure the fruits of their labor, as well as the support systems that make success possible.
The titular essay – arguably the strongest in the book – takes readers back to the 1980s, to New Jersey, where Wong was born. Wong’s parents, like many working-class Chinese immigrants, run a restaurant, but her father’s gambling addiction and frequent trips to Atlantic City soon shutter the business and divide the family. Watching her now-single mother struggle to stay afloat, Wong grows cynical and vigilant at a young age: “Underneath those boardwalk boards, there is so much rotting trash.” As Wong grapples with losses and betrayals, her horizon expands beyond her family. She discovers that her father’s addiction is endemic in Asian American communities. “Just to be clear,” she writes, “we are targeted. This is no mistake. This can’t be boiled down to cultural proclivity for luck. Casino buses roll into Chinatowns across the country like ice cream trucks for a reason.”
As Wong’s research shows, casinos attract vulnerable communities by masquerading as places where odds are fair and where power circulates. In a sense, Wong’s father’s story resonates with her own travails as a woman of color in academia, which are explored in a subsequent essay titled “Astonished Enough?” Academic institutions, as Wong depicts them, attract students from workingclass backgrounds with the promise of upward mobility and inclusivity. Once inside, these students are left to flounder and, moreover, are expected to endure harassment in silence.
Beneath Wong’s fury is her fierce loyalty to her family and the circumstances of her upbringing. In “Root Canal Street,” Wong recalls taking trips to the dentist on New York’s Lower East Side. Elsewhere, the procedures her mother needs could cost $4,500 per tooth, but they bring a mere $600 in cash to an unlicensed Chinatown practitioner. “Other mothers and daughters had manicures, spa dates, hikes, and river-rafting retreats,” Wong laments.
“Us: getting fake teeth fixed in Chinatown. Bonding over crowns.” Woven into this tapestry of economic disparity is a love letter to Asian American matriarchs, aunties and grandmas whose resourcefulness easily outshines the imagined normality of “other mothers and daughters.”
One of Wong’s mother’s catchphrases goes: “Look at you and me! Look!” Fittingly, Wong has a sharp eye for detail, irony and metaphor. In the Caesars casino, “there were towering white columns so extravagant they held up nothing at all.” On Canal Street, the elderly woman who buzzes them into the dentist’s apartment “had an insatiable sweet (fake) tooth.” Before writing this memoir, Wong recorded her observations in poems. “Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City” contains an assortment of lines from her collections “Overpour” (2016) and “How to Not Be Afraid of Everything” (2021). While these particular citations feel at times redundant, they showcase the literary prowess and commitment to craft that Wong has nourished over the course of her career.
The surest way to carve out a sustainable writing practice, Wong argues, is to recognize and maintain networks of affinity and care, particularly those built by previous generations. Although she has written what is effectively a letter of gratitude for her mother, the book also pays homage to a panoply of Asian American writers, including Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who paved the way for the contemporary cohort to which Wong belongs. Wong’s memoir invites those who have been overlooked in America to hold up their verses, accolades and solidarity in a collective rejoinder to their detractors. And it delights in a mother’s right to celebrate her daughter and vice versa: “Look at you and me! Look!”
Jenny Wu is a fiction writer, critic and independent curator.
By Jane Wong, Tin House, 276 pp, $27.95
ALTHOUGH SHE HAS WRITTEN WHAT IS EFFECTIVELY A LETTER OF GRATITUDE FOR HER MOTHER, THE BOOK ALSO PAYS HOMAGE TO A PANOPLY OF ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS.