HOMEBASE by Shawn Wong (Plume: $7.95)....

HOMEBASE by Shawn Wong (Plume: $7.95). The ghost of one of the Chinese railroad laborers Steiner discusses haunts the narrator of Shawn Wang’s impressive first novel. Named for the Northern California town where his great-grandfather first settled, Rainsford Chan drives aimlessly through the night, communing with three generations of ancestors. The reality of their lives--sometimes joyous, sometimes bitter--clashes with the expectations based on ethnic stereotypes he encounters during the day. Misty, poetic and often sensual, “Homebase” is an evocative portrait of a young man caught between two cultures. Chan concludes that the dual nature of his Chinese-American identity makes him a true citizen of the country his family helped to build: “We are old enough to haunt this land like an Indian who laid down to rest and his body became the outline of the horizon. This is my father’s canyon. See his head reclining! That peak is his nose, that cliff his chin, and his folded arms are summits.”