Mimi Kwa is an Australian journalist and television newsreader. She has a lovely partner and four children. Her road to success was not easy for she had to contend with the legacy of Kwa family dysfunction and trauma.

Her intergenerational history and memoir starts with her great grandfather in 1884 China, a successful man with multiple wives and concubines with bound feet filing his opium pipes. The first son of his third wife, Ying Kam, ran off with his father’s fourth wife. He grew a successful business in Hong Kong before the Japanese occupation during WWII. The atrocities in the streets were horrendous. Ying Kam hid his older daughters in secret rooms to protect them. His son Francis Kwa survived by collaborating with the Japanese and scavenging in ruined houses filled with corpses. After the war, Francis moved to Australia to study. He married a woman with undiagnosed mental illness. As he aged, Francis struggled with hoarding and constant litigations; he believed he could do anything, acting as his own lawyer.

Mimi’s Aunt Theresa, who was secreted the hidden room during the war, became a airline stewardess, traveling the world, making important connections, and building up wealth. Sophisticated and beautiful, she provides Mimi with a stable environment during their time together.

Kwa’s narrative of the early Kwa history, ‘Old Kwa’, is fascinating in its portrait of Old China. I would love to be able to do what she does here–imagine the lives of ancestors, bringing them alive. This section of the book reads like a novel.

‘New Kwa’ follows her father’s generational arc, including her Aunt Theresa’s success story, and ‘Now Kwa’ concentrates on her own life, acting out as a teenager, and the events that led her own father to sue her.

Kwa tells us that excavating the past was emotionally difficult and lead to writing her next story about “reconciling pst trauma, forgiveness, and gratitude.” I look forward to reading it.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. ( )

What an extraordinary book! A true life memoir of a very difficult family, achingly candid, while written with great novelistic prose.
Mimi Kwa tells of her Chinese family, from her grandfather (born 1868) through to her father, born 1935 and on to her parents cross-cultural marriage in Australia. Her mother has serious mental health problems, her father has difficulty with reality. Mimi goes off the rails as a child and teenager, but comes good as she matures. All of this is told in explicit detail, but, because of the quality of the writing, it moves on from being a tragedy, and becomes just a vivid exposition of a very different life.
I can't believe that the author has pulled off such a feat! And I can't believe how much I enjoyed the book. ( )