The Eighth Promise

In The Eighth Promise, author William Poy Lee gives us a memoir of a relationship between a mother and sonand of the Chinese American immigrant experience. His stories unfold simultaneously in the ancient Chinese farming village of his mother’s childhood during World War II while under attack by the Japanese Imperial Army, and in America in the housing projects of San Francisco’s Chinatown during the civil rights era, Vietnam War, and the countercultural 1960s and 1970s of William’s coming-of-age.

The author’s mother, Poy Jen, makes her mother eight promises before she leaves China, perhaps forever, to join her husband in America. The eighth is the most sacred.