
The Eighth Promise

The Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother is a memoir written by William Poy Lee published in 2007 by Rodale Books. The paperback version was released October 2007. A translation into Mandarin Chinese is in development with the Chinese Professors of American language and Culture Studies.
Plot synopsis.
The book interweaves a second generation Chinese American man's reflections on his upbringing in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s with an oral history shared by his mother, Poy Jen, and her migration from Toisan, Guangdong.
The author's personal memoir is set against the background of San Francisco of the 1960s and 1970s. Lee reflects on his childhood in working class Chinatown, Chinese American participation in the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and race relations through the era.
The oral histories begin in the Southern Chinese farming villages of Toisan, where Poy Jen was born in 1926. The author shares interviews conducted in his family's original Toisanese dialect, translated into English. Poy Jen makes her mother eight promises before she leaves war-torn China to join her husband in America in 1950.
Throughout the memoir, Lee traces the role of the promises in his own life and his mother's. The eighth promise serves as the thematic center of the book:
"It is the Eighth Promise -- to live with compassion toward all -- that I think of as the ever-living promise, the one for all of one's days. And this promise, this way -- perhaps arising to the level of a moral path -- strikes me as the distillation of all the wisdom of my kin."
Themes.
The multiple levels of the narrative can be summarized as:
Awards and recognition.
Media outlets such as NPR, Fora TV and universities such as University of Kansas have invited the author for speaking engagements and interviews. Although the book primarily depicts the life of a Chinese American, many of the most avid and vocal readers are from other ethnicities such as Hispanics and Italian Americans. In late October 2007, the book won the 2007 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for outstanding and original contribution to multicultural literature. The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan selected the book for its 2008 One city one book program, Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads.