victimization with issues related to her hyphen-
ated identity as a Chinese American. In addition,
through Wang’s troubled relationships with her
mother and sister, Chao shows how the victimiza-
tion of one family member can create acute psy-
chological issues for every member of the family.
In contrast to the generally positive responses
to The Monkey King, Mambo Peligroso received
somewhat mixed reviews. Drawing on her own
experience as a mambo dancer, Chao focuses on
the experiences of a half-Japanese and half-Cuban
young woman, named Catalina Ortiz Midori, who
becomes obsessed with mastering the mambo.
Success in this quest would provide multiple satis-
factions—validating her efforts to her demanding
dance teacher, strengthening the romantic attrac-
tion between them, and providing her with a much
more viable sense of her cultural identity. Although
reviewers thought that Chao’s narrative is invested
with a great deal of vivid immediacy, they did not
think that she credibly integrated a subplot involv-
ing an attempted assassination of Fidel Castro. In
sum, they maintained that the narrative captured
the energy of Latin dance but possessed not quite
enough of its controlled structure.
Martin KichCheng, Terrence (1972– )
Terrence Cheng has received wide acclaim for his
first novel, Sons of Heaven (2002). Inspired by the
Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 Beijing, the
novel symbolically returns Cheng to the place
his grandparents had once called home. Cheng’s
grandparents and parents moved from Beijing,
China, to Taipei, Taiwan, in 1949. Born in 1972 in
Taiwan, Cheng never experienced his grandpar-
ents’ fear and worry while living in China during
the rise of Communism. Just one year after Cheng’s
birth, his parents moved to New York, where he
has lived ever since. Cheng’s interest in politics and
history was most likely encouraged by hearing of
his grandmother’s political activism in Beijing as
a senator in the Chinese Nationalist Party before
Mao Zedong and the Communist Party came to
power. Sons of Heaven grew out of Cheng’s horror
as a teenager at seeing the democracy movement in
Tiananmen Square crushed by a ruthless military
who slaughtered numerous protesting students.
Cheng explains that he felt emotionally con-
nected to China and the Chinese people as he
watched the news footage of the massacre. He re-
alized that he could have been one of those hurt or
killed, had his grandparents not moved to Taiwan.
Like many people around the world, Cheng was
haunted by the widely published and now famous
image of one man, probably a student, who walked
in front of the Chinese military tanks and refused
to move. As the tanks attempted to maneuver
around, the unknown man continued to step into
and block their path. Cheng’s novel imagines a life
and a voice for the brave, nameless young man who
tried to stop a line of tanks with only his body.
Having earned an M.F.A. in fiction from the
University of Miami, Cheng set out to write Sons
of Heaven with the inspiration of his favorite au-
thors: Don Delillo, Cormac McCarthy, Philip
Roth, and HA JIN. Although the novel’s backdrop
is political, Sons of Heaven is more a story about
families and individuals caught within historical
contexts. Cheng explains that the nameless man
became a symbol of forces in conflict: “East ver-
sus West, democracy versus communism, history
clashing with the present.” However, the story has
also been described as a “family saga,” and Cheng
admits that the novel is more about individuals
than about nations or politics: “I wanted to know
him, his name, his family, his past, to try and un-
derstand the things in his life that had brought
him to that point. What makes a man so incred-
ibly brave, stupid, and scared—so human, and yet
transcendent?”
Sons of Heaven creates a name (Xiao-Di) for
the brave, proud man who stood up for his be-
liefs, even if it meant death. Raised by his grand-
parents in Beijing, Xiao-Di travels to America to
study on a scholarship at Cornell University. He
falls in love with an all-American blond-haired
beauty, but more important, he falls in love with
the American lifestyle of free thought and action.
After returning to Beijing just three months beforeCheng, Terrence 39