The Coffin Tree

by Wendy Law-Yone

Book Overview

Wendy Law-Yone opens her first novel with the phrase of a survivor, "Living things prefer to go on living." A young woman and her older half-brother are expelled from their home in Burma by a savage political coup. Sent to elusive safety in America, the motherless siblings find themselves engulfed by the indifference, hypocrisy, and cruelty of an American society unable to deal with difference. Her brother's death drives the unnamed narrator into...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810151413
• ISBN13: 9780810151413
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Triquarterly Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The Travails of a Burmese Brother and Sister

While this book is billed as fiction, I believe it is autobiographical. It is about a Burmese brother and sister who travel to the United States after a coup in Burma. The story of their childhood is a hard to decipher fantasy coupled with cultural differences that make it all the more bizarre. Both brother and sister are mentally ill. After the sister's suicide attempt that nearly results in her death, the young woman embraces life. She realizes that even if her childhood was a fantasy that her brother was embracing, it was still of value to him. Though the book was deep and delved into deep and mysterious places, it seemed devoid of passion, as though the author wanted it that way intentionally as a self-protective device.

Exquisite novel

Law-Yone's writing is so precise, I could practically taste the world of this young Burmese woman as she journeys to America. Her experiences and emotions felt incredibly real to me, and I had great empathy for her--though there is nothing sentimental about the story. A beautiful first novel.

Provocative narrative of insanity in ethnic America.

It's a terrible loss to Asian American literature (and literature in general) that this book is no longer in print. It details the migration of a Burmese woman and her brother to America as political refugees, and metaphorizes the way in which migration to the US and becoming a "colored minority" created a more abstract, and inescapable, refugeeism, which eventually manifests itself as imprisonment. The first half of the book details what nowadays is termed a "typical immigrant experience," in which the protagonist deals with discrimination and poverty. The second half of the narrative describes a descent into insanity, and as such, the writing reflects the disjointed and startling incoherencies that the rest of us usually associate with loss of mental control.Written in 1983, when Asian Americans registered only a small blip on the American literary map, and describing an experience that Asian Americanists neglect, Law-Yone's work deserves another look.[Just to help convince you...the back cover of the copy I have includes glowing reviews from The Boston Globe, NYTBR, Booklist, and The Nation.]