Traces the rewards and pitfalls of a Chinese mother's exercise in extreme parenting, describing the exacting standards applied to grades, music lessons, and avoidance of Western cultural practices.

"The rules, guidelines, principles, precepts, decrees, no-no's, yes-yes's, and arbitrary judgments of Patty's mother."--Back cover. A gift collection of witty one-liners by the New Yorker writer and first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon celebrates the universal advice of her mother and is accompanied by full-color illustrations by a New Yorker staff cartoonist. Illustrations.

"Ocean Vuong's second collection of poetry looks inward, on the aftershocks of his mother's death, and the struggle - and rewards - of staying present in the world. Time Is a Mother moves outward and onward, in concert with the themes of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, as Vuong continues, through his work, his profound exploration of personal trauma, of what it means to be the product of an American war in America, and how to circle these fragmented...