SOURCE: A review of Monkey King, in The New York Times, March 16, 1997, p. 21.

[In the following review, Gambone calls Monkey King "a considerable achievement," despite finding the novel's ending "reductive."]

At 28, Sally Wang would seem to have many advantages, including a fine education and a promising career as an art director in New York. But "all this American stuff" cannot dispel the ghost that haunts her—that of her father, now dead, who sexually molested her as a child. After an attempted suicide, Sally embarks on the painful process of exorcising this demon and coming to terms with the lies and blind spots in herself and her family—a family in which filial respect, perfectionism and the public pretense that, as she puts it, "everything's hunky-dory" obscure hard realities. This is a familiar theme in contemporary Chinese-American literature, but Patricia Chao, who makes her debut with this novel...