A propulsive, intimate memoir about a Chinese American family whose smallest decisions ripple across oceans and decades—and about a mountain town, aptly named Story, that taught a son how to tell the truth he was raised to outrun.
It began with an email from a podcaster in Sheridan: a request for comment on a cardboard archive box in the county library labeled "CHEN, M." and a whisper about a church sponsorship that wasn't what it seemed. When John asked his father, Ming-Te, about it, the old man stirred tea without drinking, named the weather, changed the subject, and finally wept. He had always known this day would come.
The Chens left Kaohsiung in 1979 for Story, Wyoming, under the wing of a Lutheran congregation on Fish Hatchery Road. John's mother, An-Wei, taught English in a prefab classroom that smelled of chalk dust and wet wool; his father ran the till at the Wagon Box Inn and translated at the Greyhound depot in Sheridan. In a house with fake-wood paneling and a view of Tongue River Canyon, a bamboo suitcase hid a ledger written in oil pencil, a tin of 8mm reels, and a harmonica in D. The ledger recorded baptisms that weren't sacraments and cousins who weren't cousins—names threaded through money orders, borrowed ZIP codes, and a circuit of bus tickets that moved families from Fort Chaffee, Arkansas to apartments in Billings, Missoula, and Pocatello. In the walk-in freezer behind the bar, Ming-Te traded forged certificates and affidavits for stories recorded on a RadioShack cassette deck—testimony that later surfaced in a lawyer's brief in Cheyenne and drew the attention of the INS and a grand jury in Casper. What began as sanctuary blurred into smuggling, and the line between repair and ruin thinned to a hair.
Tales of Story moves between Los Angeles and the high plains, a Kaohsiung alley glittering with scooter oil, and a motel off I-90 outside Bozeman where John meets a man known in the ledger only as "Uncle Seven." Along the way: a chipped celadon bowl, a blue county-issue parka, butcher paper lists inked in cold rooms, and the stubborn myth of self-reliance that kept a town quiet. At its heart is a choice: to unseal the names in Sheridan and risk the elders who survive by vanishing, or to keep the long silence that once protected them. It is a reckoning with complicity and care, and an argument that the place called Story keeps asking us to write a better ending.
A luminous memoir that turns archives, bus tickets, and a mountain town into a reckoning about care and complicity, written with a tender steadiness that lingers long after the last page.
Por tono y nervio me recordó a Beth Nguyen y a T Kira Madden, con esa mezcla de memoria familiar y mapa migratorio. La escritura es clara y honesta, y los detalles materiales del archivo son memorables.
Aun así, sentí distancia en la primera mitad y algunos tramos legales se estiran. Para lectores que buscan ética compleja y paisaje, funciona, pero yo quería un pulso narrativo más constante.
Story, Wyoming feels lived in, from Fish Hatchery Road to the Tongue River Canyon view that keeps changing color as the chapters shift. The book treats place like a witness that notices everything and refuses to testify. Kaohsiung's alley glitters with scooter oil, a motel off I-90 hums behind thin walls, and the Greyhound depot becomes a small stage where arrivals rewrite themselves.
The stakes are environmental as much as legal. Silence circulates in a town that prizes self-reliance, and the atmosphere of watchfulness gives every errand and church bulletin a charge.
The people here breathe. John learns to hear what his father will not say, and Ming-Te's tea spoon tapping the cup becomes its own kind of dialogue. An-Wei's classroom of wet wool and chalk dust gives her a stage where she is both teacher and student, translating not only words but disappointment and pride.
Conversations are spare, so the meanings arrive in sidelong ways. A ledger pulled from a bamboo suitcase. A harmonica passed across a kitchen table. The restraint made me lean forward, and when emotion breaks through, it does so with earned force.
Formally, this is a confident braid across Kaohsiung, Wyoming, and Los Angeles; Chen glides between timelines with clean seams and a patient eye for scene. At times the legal filings and procedural echoes in Cheyenne bog the cadence, and the repeated weather notes feel like an overused motif, but the prose at the line level is steady and the cassette transcripts add an electric layer of voice.
I finished and just sat there, buzzing. The cardboard archive box, the blue county parka, the harmonica in D, the ledger inked in oil pencil. Objects as portals, each one a testimony and a dare.
What moved me most is how the book refuses easy absolution. Sanctuary tilts toward smuggling, and still there is love, still there is a town with chalk dust in its lungs pretending not to know. The ethics are knotted, and the author never cuts the knot for us.
The scenes in Story and Sheridan land with a quiet thud. A church basement fluorescent and echoing. A walk-in freezer that remembers voices. A cassette recorder catching fear and a kind of hope.
And then the line that keeps ringing in my head: that Story "keeps asking us to write a better ending." The memoir becomes an invitation to risk telling, to unlearn the comfort of vanishing.
Yes, yes, yes. This is intimate and propulsive without spectacle, a reckoning that holds both repair and ruin in one trembling hand. I will be thinking about the weather being named, and the long silence before the weeping, for a long time.
