My obsession with the power of Lake Superior has resulted in a new, wild short story.  I’ll perform it before a live radio audience, thanks to an invitation from the lovely Anca Szilagyi. She curates The Furnace, an innovative reading series in Seattle.   If you are in town, come on by and join the party.  Get a chapbook of the story.

Set along the crackling, icy shore of Lake Superior, drawing on nautical terminology and their definitions, and featuring a mysterious sea beast, “Fetch” tells the haunting story of a car accident and its aftermath.

The details again:

Thursday, May 16, 7-8 pm

Hollow Earth Radio performance space

“If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.”
–Maria Semple

I wasn’t laughing much this week.  I’ve been dog tired and overwhelmed.   It’s partly the Pacific Northwest.  We don’t have torrential winter or spring.  We have a smug wet 24 hours a day.  If you step out of your house blindfolded here you would be hard-pressed to tell whether it’s midnight or noon.  For this lack of excitement we are smugly grateful. I’ve also been carrying around an impossible, eye-crossing To Do list for my job. I’m happy when I misplace it because then I can’t add anything more to it.

When HH (the handsome husband) handed me this novel after I’d burrowed in under the blankets for the night, I groaned.  The kids were all in bed and there was no chocolate left in the house.  The day was done.  “Go away,” I said to HH.  “Nothing personal.”  I was hoping for sleep and in the morning a chance to stare glumly at a troublesome chapter from my own manuscript. I’d neglected revising for the last week because of that To Do list.  (See above.)

But books are love, and I needed some, so I opened it and read,  “The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he says, ‘What’s most important is for you to understand it’s not your fault.’ You’ll notice that wasn’t even the question.”    That’s Bee talking, the teenage narrator who spends the entirety of the plot piecing together where her mother, Bernadette, disappeared to and why she left in the first place.  Along the way Maria Semple, the author, brilliantly skewers in broad, hiliarous terms the smugness of Seattle, Microsoft, and middle class “parenting”.  She reminds us—okay me–that if we don’t create we’ll do damage, often to those dearest to us and most certainly to ourselves.  We’ll sink under the jobs we’re glad we have, the ones we write those To Do lists for.

I read Where’d You Go, Bernadette until dawn, slept an hour, then rolled out of bed with an answer to that tricky chapter in my own novel draft.  I love this book.

For the last month my students and I have talked in depth about the first two novels in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam Trilogy. Next week we sit down with The Handmaid’s Tale.

Oryx and Crake. The first novel in this brilliantly frustrating trilogy.

Our biggest debate has been over what defines a contemporary hero and if Atwood’s characters make the cut. It seems we embrace the conviction that now more than ever we need leaders, but what are their qualities in a time of manipulated images, pervasive corporate power, lightning fast information, and science gone wild? Who to trust and why? As usual, Atwood is evasive and unwilling to give us a definitive answer.

Even more frustrating: We have to wait until early 2013 for the last book of the MadAddam trilogy to come out. The course will be over by then, but we’re planning to get back together to talk about whether or not we get the ending we hope for and anticipate. I predict more delicious trademark Atwood wordplay and a keen mirror held up to what frightens us about where the future is headed.

Jenna Cook and her mom, Margaret Cook

This week Tea Leaf Nation, an intriguing new blog following Chinese netizens, shared the story of a Chinese-American college student, Jenna Cook, who is looking for her birth parents in China.  Her interviews and related posts have gone viral there.

It takes an impressive amount of courage to go so public with a search.  There’s the real possibility of dead ends and bad news.  So far Jenna has found no answers, but she’s not giving up and says she never will.

What Tea Leaf Nation fixates on are the numbers of people in China–in the hundreds of thousands–already avidly following Jenna’s story. It’s often hard for people outside of China to grasp the sheer numbers of people who live there, and how those numbers also complicate an adoptee’s chances of finding her birth parents.  Looking for a lost family is like a quest to find a handful of needles in a hundred haystacks.  Mountainous haystacks, I might add.  But that massive population in Jenna’s case could turn into a source of strength because of the internet.

An interview Jenna gave on Weibo (a microblogging service) inspired over 330,000 posts. Her first tweet drew another 28,000 reposts and a stunning 4,000 comments.    If I could read Chinese, I would have devoured the commentary, I assure you.   Fortunately Tea Leaf nation translates or shares some of the English ones with readers.

One responder, for instance, wanted her to “stop trying to find your birth parents” because they could not match her adoptive mother in kindness or open mindedness. Another commenter said, “A birth mother is not as dear as an adoptive mother.”

As an adoptive mother, I admit feeling warmed by sentiments like these.  But here’s the rub: It’s not a competition, right? (A follow-up article by Tea Leaf nation says for some Chinese parents it might be.)

When I adopted my daughters from China in the early 2000s, there seemed little hope of finding their birth parents. When or how to search was not an issue.  There were no reliable records and no witnesses of their abandonment—at least none easy to find.  Even if a possible family were identified, DNA testing was still too expensive and inaccessible to be realistic except in the high case of a probable match.  Hope then rested on the emerging internet in China and its potential.  And that time has come. Jenna Cook’s search is an example of how it may be a netizens’ community effort that will reunite children and birth families.

So what will I do the day one of my girls asks to look for her people in China? I’ll say yes, of course, because  I am her mother and I support her decisions.  After that I’ll slip off for a few minutes, curl up in a ball and quietly give into panic over what I cannot control, including how she might be hurt by what she discovers or how our family might never be the same.  Then I’ll get up, take a deep breath, and help her take the first step–which will likely begin on the internet.

——————

Jenna is also one of four Chinese-American adoptees featured in the documentary Somewhere Between.  I blog about the award-winning film here.  Tea Leaf Nation’s aim to track the Chinese populace by what develops in web land there is fascinating business.  If you “like” Tea Leaf on Facebook, they will donate to the Rural Education Program, a much needed support system in China.

I found it impossible not to fall in love with Somewhere Between, a documentary about four American teenagers adopted from China.

In the documentary Somewhere Between, girls adopted from China tell their stories.

When it showed at the Portland International Film festival, I went determined to be objective, but I was anxious. Would the film present a melodramatic spin on birthparents or a critical lens on adoptive parents? I half-expected a vague celebration of Chinese culture. Since adopting my first daughter over ten years ago, and getting to know orphanages and adoptees well through efforts and visits at the orphanages in Fuling and Zhanjiang, I’ve worked my way through the spectrum of stories on adoption, often poignant and personal, sometimes painful.

With time, and as I’ve written my own novel on this subject, I’ve reached the point of wanting a story about adoption to stretch to the wider concerns formed by adoptees themselves. My own “tween” daughters from China struggle with questions like: Who am I, really? What happened to me? How do I negotiate the way I joined my family and how I immigrated to America? How can I understand the person I am now without thinking about the one I might have been in China had my birth family kept me?

Suffice it to say by fifteen minutes into the film my eyes started to run. Using a graciously piercing and playful approach, Director Linda Goldstein Knowlton gets at the truth of things. She follows the girls through their daily lives and accomplishments–one is a Southern beauty queen, another a top scholar on the East Coast, another fluent in Chinese and a high school artist in California, the other a self-contained and hilarously outspoken daughter in Pennsylvania.

Finding out who they are will be no simple path, and it will mean confronting the loss of their birth families and birth country in whatever way they can.

The four subjects admit they struggle with how to fit in. Teenagers everywhere work through this, particularly those in mixed race and multi-cultural families, so the documentary resonates with a universal quality. At the same time these questions become specific to each girl. Their journeys and personalities are markedly different. What they share is an awakening the viewer also reaches by the end of the film: Finding out who they are will be no simple path, and it will mean confronting the loss of their birth families and birth country in the way that makes most sense to them.

How far they go for answers even in the year or so span of the filming makes for both inspiring and sobering watching. By the end of  Somewhere Between, we’re left with the realization that these teenagers, like the majority of kids adopted from China, are at that brink of becoming adults. Their identity does not rest primarily on being anyone’s child anymore–their adoptive parents or birthparents. Raised to be strong, proud, and in most all cases open about their adoptions, these young adults will have plenty to say about who they are and how they got there.

“There is a simple test: ‘Does this writer’s capacity for language expand my capacity to think and to feel?’” Jeannette Winterson

December is the month when newspapers and literary blogs put out their lists of the 10 best books of the year. These lists, determined by committee (it seems), usually represent books published by bigger, commercial presses and often make me feel combative. “Ten best books? Says who?” Roxane Gay of The Rumpus wrote a spot-on article on the fallacy of those Ten Bests. She points instead to books published this year that truly moved her and met criteria many of us can believe in. (Gay’s article included the Jeannette Winterson quote above.) All that said, I like lists, and I thought the Christian Science Monitor’s 10 Best Fiction books the most intriguing of those I’ve run across this month.

A few days ago, my beautiful friend Diane asked for titles of books I’d recommend. My first impulse was to send her the Christian Science Monitor’s list, but after I thought of my friend, how complex her life, how much I missed her–we’ve seen each other rarely since high school–I rifled through the stash of bedside books I haven’t gotten to yet in search of something she’d like. If I suggested some of these, maybe we could read them at the same time and compare notes?

But this list was for Diane, a brilliant and generous thinker. Diane had been a soul mate of my youth, a gift to me because she set her own rules and dared me to set my own. She said what was in her heart, no holds barred. Had we lived close by each other all these years, been able to trade books and personal stories, how would we have grown and changed together? Novels, because of the way they take readers beyond the known and seemingly possible, would (I imagine) have been our thing.

Dearest Diane, these are the books I hope you like because I love them. I wish we had read them together. (When you get a chance, please send your picks for me.)

A River Sutra by Gita Mehta. An elegant tale and treatise on desire, set in India, entwining three faiths. Most precious to me because I listened to it on tape (back then) while anxiously waiting to adopt our first daughter and knitting the first sweater (a child’s) I ever made. Mehta’s characters show how dangerous it is to want something very badly and yet how sacred it is to be consumed by that desire.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. First read this as a junior in college. First novel written by a woman I studied in college. Assigned by a male professor who would lecture at length and with passion on the works of Austen, Bronte and Woolf. I can recite whole sentences from this book. Images come back to me when I am out walking and thinking through the stories I am writing. Gave me permission to keep going with my writing and to never give up.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A delicious story of lovers separated almost all their lives. Epic in scope, playfulness and suggestion. First read this late into the night during a cool, long summer in at my parent’s old house in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Woke up each morning under layers of blankets and still inside Garcia Marquez’ dream. Maybe I still am?

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Piercy imagines a future in which true mutual respect is possible. The leap toward the fantastical in this book opens up a discussion that has never stopped for me and many friends, including those warrior women and men I met in graduate school when I first read this novel. We set out armed to read, write and think. We continue to believe.

Sula by Toni Morrison. “We was girls together,” Morrison writes. Central to this book, set in a Black community on the brink of being torn apart, is the friendship of Sula and Nel. Morrison goes deep with this gorgeous, mythic story of how people are sacrificed in one way or another when they (and we) do not have the room to expand and accommodate.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. We each have our place in history.To pull one string is to find the whole cloth. I cannot remember the first time I read this book, only that it was the first novel I started to take apart as a writer in order to understand what the story had done to me as a reader and how.

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. When I close my eyes I can see June Kashpaw, the character the narrative circles, sitting against the fence in the snow. All of the other characters approach her through this fabulously well told story. As I figured out how to structure my own novel, I kept returning to Love Medicine. I have an ongoing, open love affair with Erdrich’s writing. America’s story spills out in her innovative and image-rich fiction.

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson. Surprising and deeply imaginative retelling of the slave trade. Johnson does something profound with a fine dance of humor, irony, and allusion to literature of all kinds. For the last ten years in a row I have “taught” this book to my students, and it always ranks for them in the top two or three novels of the semester. I keep asking them to read it because of what the tale does to our hearts and heads. What separates us is not what we have been taught.

The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. Most recent addition to my list of “greats.” Byatt’s deliciously substantial novel takes on early 20th century artisan culture in England by focusing on a famous female writer and mother of four who writes for her children and for publication. Page by page, the book expands to take in characters and events during a time that shifted our perspective on art of all kinds, including who makes it and why. On the top of my bedside books for rereading.

And because I’m on a roll:

9 More Simply Great Novels worth reading together “had we world enough and time.”

Atonement by Ian McEwan. There is a fine line between telling stories and lies. Provocative, discomfiting read.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Shakespear’s King Lear retold through the story of an American farm family.Disturbingly clever and moving.

Complete Fiction of Lu Xun. Early 20th century China distilled through Lu Xun’s fiction. Feel him picking at China, at all of us. Ironic, recognizable characters. (Okay this is not a novel, but if we would all pretend it is, then the book would get wider distribution and be read everywhere. As it should.)

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić. Translated from Serbian, this book feels like a secret text smuggled out and left to us to read back to front or front to back. Each direction reveals a different story. Pavić writes: “No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary. Hence each reader will put together the book for himself . . .”

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Bronte’s edginess and sensuality makes this a mouth-watering 19th century read. She took risks. This novel speaks volumes on the need to find one’s own value.

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. James’ twist on the tragic heroine adds another dimension (or five) to what marriage is all about, 19th century style.

Searoad by Ursula LeGuin. As well as writing mind-blowingly good science fiction and short fiction, LeGuin gets places perfectly, including Oregon coastal peoples and the influence of the sea. This novel does it for me. If you like this book, take an unconventional leap into her science fiction with Fisherman of the Inland Sea, a collection of short stories and novella that will do all sorts of things to your sense of time and place.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. Fiction? Nonfiction? What are we? What, given more ways to tell a story, could we be?

Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson. Cried with awe the first time I read this book. Go further, she tells us. Go beyond.