The Many Daughters of Afong Moy. Jamie Ford. 2022. 36 Pages. (Hardcover.)
I have included the author’s note and the unusually long acknowledgments at the end in the pagination of this work as they go some way to explaining the meaning of this unusual book. I thought that it was Linda who recommended it but now seriously doubt that.
This Montana novelist’s stories range from 1836 to a futuristic 2086, exploring the similarities of an extended family beginning with Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman who escaped from an arranged marriage to New York. She worked as a singer in night clubs and subsisted in boarding houses arranged by her managers. Others include Greta, who joined a feminist dating app in 2014 that went viral, then imploded when it was revealed that their major funder was an abusive billionaire playboy. Her daughter, troubled Dorothy in a dysfunctional marriage in 2045 undergoes epigenetic therapy to restore memories that she has never experienced, but that other unknown members of her ancestry have. Thereafter, by the time we get to her daughter in 2086, epigenic therapy companies have proliferated.
There is a lot of speculation about transgenerational epigenetics particularly of PTSD from past trauma, determinism, and free will, all woven into a very puzzling novel. To follow and make sense of the story, one needs to keep the year, the person and the location identified at the start of most of the chapters in mind as one reads it. Otherwise it can become very confusing, and even doing so, I remained confused. Once I was finished I went back and tried to connect the dots, but it did not help much.
3/5
The Passionate Reader 