MA IN ALL CAPS is a laugh-out-loud hilarious “ma-moir” about an irrepressible woman known to the world as Ma. Epic and sweeping in its storytelling, but as intimate as a son’s love for his ailing mother, it’s David Sedaris meets Amy Tan in a family history and saga, with an unforgettable tiger mom holding center stage.

Ma is the opinionated matriarch of the Chinese Kuo clan, the scion of a once wealthy and powerful Chinese family that lost everything during two devastating wars and has been struggling since to regain its former glory. Ma brings you into the Kuo family through her unfiltered storytelling spanning five generations, three centuries, and two continents, leaving you amazed by her wit and bluntness while charming you with her inimitable way of looking at and judging the world.

From the Author:

Family memoirs are fraught. Tell the truth, warts and all, and your own family members might resent you. Get the facts wrong, and you’ll spark family dinner arguments for years.

The MA IN ALL CAPS book project became just such an ambitious undertaking. I knew it had to be more than just one of those “family history books” or “biography books.” The project began after I’d collected up hundreds of verbatim conversations between me and Ma, which I dutifully recorded and immediately posted on social media, to the delight of my friends. The most frequent feedback I received was, “These are hilarious. You need to write a book with them all in it.”

MA IN ALL CAPS is a collection of her near-fantastical but amazingly true stories. It is also the tale of two nations, China and the U.S., as they came into their own just as “Ma highschooler” became “Ma immigrant.” Because it’s a memory piece, I don’t know if I can faithfully call it “non-fiction,” because who knows what tricks memory worn by time have played in Ma’s recountings. What emerges from this telling is a complex heroine: the eldest daughter of an ambitious couple tied to the political class in China, a girl raised surprisingly as a Catholic by her devout mother, who manages to blend Chinese tradition with Christian priggishness. It’s not always a winning combination, but it produces inimitable character, if Ma is any example.

Readers have told me that, while they expected Ma to bring her characteristic humor, they didn’t expect the stories to be so gripping, the stakes so high. War, death and love can do that.

And while I didn’t set out to write a Chinese book, and while most people learn about China only through reading “leadership books” or “business books” on the subject, readers have also told me they did not expect to learn so much about Chinese culture and politics in the pre-communist era, as the defeated Nationalists fled to Taiwan to plot their return one day. The echoes of that conflict still raise blood pressures today.

I wrote MA IN ALL CAPS with future generations of Kuos in mind so that they, too, can learn about the indefatigable Ma, a force of nature that defined our family. She and Ba put stakes in the ground here in the U.S., a foreign land that became their home and ours. I hope that through laughter and a few lumps in the throat, Ma’s spirit will grace readers and live on in their memories, long after they have turned the final page.

Jay Kuo