Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter

 

By Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao

Viking     2020

352 pages     Memoir

An introduction to the book: “In alternating narrative chapters between mother and daughter, two women write about their past and families in this literary memoir. Lan, the mother, came to the U.S. as a 13-year-old refugee. Harlan, her daughter, struggles to make friends and come into her own. The two women narrate their intense struggles as they each form their own identities.”

Family in Six Tones is a striking memoir, for the most part because Lan Cao is an excellent author. She was born in Vietnam and fled the war when she was 13 in 1975. Her daughter Harlan was born in Virginia in 2002, so Harlan is in her teenage years as the mother-daughter duo write this book. After Harlan is born, Lan Cao faces the challenge of not just surviving and succeeding on her own, but now she is responsible for helping this young American-born child survive and thrive.

I kept underlining passages that I found particularly appealing. Passages particularly in Lan Cao’s portion of the narrative. She has the ability to put thoughts into words that are both heart-rending and relatable. Harlan’s story, while very different from her mother’s, is also appealing in a bratty-daughter kind of way. I kept thinking, “Gosh, I’ve already been through this several times with my daughter and my young adult granddaughters. I don’t need to go through this again.” This thought is echoed by the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer who mentions that Harlan’s experiences are “thin.” On the other hand, not very many teenaged girls are able to express their issues with their mothers quite so eloquently. The Kirkus reviewer says, “What makes this memoir especially compelling is the way these two separate but linked perspectives illuminate silences or gaps in the stories that each woman tells.”

Lan Cao’s memoir tells a refugee story that is totally relatable, and it meant a great deal to me because of my trip to Vietnam a year ago, when we experienced the aftermath of a war that continues to reverberate in that country. Harlan relates how she sees the war resonating in her mother all these years later. Their trip to Saigon together helps to heal both of their wounds and find some common ground. Whatever the weaknesses of the joint narration, there are moments of profound meaning for the reader.

In 2015 when Family in Six Tones was just an idea, the two did a Story Corps interview which is especially interesting. You can listen to it here.

 

Next Year in Havana

 By Chanel Cleeton

Berkeley     2018

356 pages     Literary

If you like serious history lessons mixed in with your romance fiction, you are going to love Next Year in Havana. It is the story of a grandmother and granddaughter in two distinct generations and their love affair in Cuba. Grandma Elisa Perez, was the daughter of a Cuban sugar baron—one of four sisters—forced to leave Cuba and everything they loved because their father was a proponent of the old way of life, pre-Castro. Elisa is a young adult in love with Pablo, a revolutionary, and is totally bereft when it appears that he has been killed in the revolution. Years later, her granddaughter, Marisol, has promised to bury her ashes in Havana, and because of her journalism credentials, she is able to travel in 2017 to visit the city, meet the people close to her grandmother, and fall in love with Luis, the grandson of her grandmother’s best friend.

It's all very heavy, with long passages of history interspersed with the sights and sounds of Havana and bits and pieces of romance and family life. The Kirkus review says “Somber and humor-free, the novel feels uncomfortably strung between its twin missions to entertain and to teach detailed, repetitive factual lessons.” That’s exactly how I felt. It was very heavy, and if I hadn’t been reading it for my book club, I would not have finished it.

However, at book club this week, we had a guest speaker—a Kalamazoo woman who had been part of the diaspora from Cuba. As a 12-year-old, she had been sent to an orphanage in Miami to wait for her parents to be able to leave Cuba. We were thrilled to hear her story, because the history lesson was so much more vibrant than that of Chanel Cleeton’s. She told about how her family were reunited and ended up in Kalamazoo, when religious family services got her father a job at a pharmaceutical company. She has returned to Cuba several times since 2010, and she was able to give us detailed information about how the country is faring now.  

To its credit, Next Year in Havana introduced me to some history that I knew little about. Of course I remembered Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs, other aspects of the revolution, and especially the antique cars, but there was much I didn't know. Cleeton has a sequel that has come out recently, When We Left Cuba, the story of Elisa’s sister, Beatriz. Finally, The Last Train to Key West, which arrived in June, tells the story of two more women and their involvement with Cuba. Some of her earlier books also deal with Cuba and romance.

Chanel Cleeton’s website.

Addis Ababa Noir

 Edited by Maaza Mengiste

Akashic     2020

256 pages    Noir

We have always rented our small basement apartment to graduate students, and it was our great good fortune to have Samson and his wife Nofkote as renters for two years. Samson had come to Western Michigan University from Addis Ababa to pursue a Master’s Degree. During the civil war, Nofkote had fled to the United States from Ethiopia with her family while Samson’s family had retreated to a rural area of Ethiopia.  Both were members of the same tribe—a tribe that had fallen out of favor during the civil war. Both fathers had been government officials. Samson’s father became a carpenter and Nofkote’s father drove a taxi in Washington DC.

 I learned so much from them. After graduation, they moved back to the DC area, where there is a very large Ethiopian community. Four years ago we were invited to Samson’s sister’s wedding in Detroit. We met Ethiopian doctors, lawyers, and professors, all of whom had come to the United States from Addis Ababa during the diaspora. It was an extraordinary experience to meet them and to hear their harrowing stories.

So, it was with this background, I absorbed the stories in Addis Ababa Noir. The stories are beautifully written and express the highs and lows of this incredible city—a city that has suffered greatly and a people that have suffered along with their city. Some of the authors have moved to other parts of the world and write about the Addis Ababa of their memory, either before or during the Red Terror. Some of the authors live there today. All have so much to tell us.

Like most of the Akashic Noir series, the fourteen stories in the collection run the gamut of the genre. Few can be called pure Noir, but all are haunting and describe a longing for better days and more peaceful times. I was particularly taken by the story of a young woman who returns to the city to bury a beloved aunt, only to find her previously unknown father and some startling details about her mother’s death. Another remarkable story concerns a small child who daily watches the ostriches as they wander the palace yard, but then one day she is sure she sees a dead body on the sidewalk in front of the palace, right by the bump in the road. In another, an old man tells a stranger a story about a woman he saw on the street. He was sure she was the girl he had known in school and fallen in love with. And then, tragedy strikes.  

Knowing what I already knew about the Ethiopian diaspora, the stories held a unique fascination for me. Maaza Mengiste, the editor, says in the introduction, “What marks life in Addis Ababa are the starkly different realities coexisting in one place. It's a growing city taking shape beneath the fraught weight of history, myth, and memory. It is a heady mix. It can also be disorienting, and it is in this space that the stories of Addis Ababa Noir reside.”

These are the stories of a people, who have faced disaster head on and have arisen tough and  resilient. Adddis Ababa Noir is as remarkable a collection as the people who populate it.

Here is a sample from the introduction of the book.

Act of Revenge: A Doc Brady Mystery

 By John Bishop MD

Mantid Press 2020

247 pages     Thriller

Doc Brady, the alter-ego for John Bishop, the author, is an appealing character—an orthopedist, loving husband to a delightful wife, and an intensely curious person who solves crimes. Act of Revenge is the third book in the series, but it does very well as  a stand-alone novel. The first novel, Act of Murder discusses genetics;  in Act of Deception, Doc. Brady is sued for malpractice. And now in Act of Revenge, malpractice insurance rises to the fore.

Here is a brief introduction to the book:

“Plastic surgeon Lou Edwards's life is complicated by two major issues. One, his wife has lupus, possibly due to leaking silicone from breast implants Edwards himself inserted. And two, his malpractice insurance has been canceled, as it has been for many other plastic surgeons, due to the burgeoning breast implant problem.
But it gets worse. Shortly after Edwards threatens an insurance company president on national TV, the president is found murdered in his penthouse. Dr. Jim Bob Brady once again finds himself doing a bit of investigating, this time on behalf of a colleague. But how well does he know this colleague? Is the investigation worth the threat to Jim Bob's own life? Will he discover that it was a burglary gone bad? A lover's quarrel? Or is this an act of revenge?“

The first couple of chapters are a delight. Bishop does a great job of sucking you into the settings and the characters. Mary Louise, the doctor’s wife, is a delightful person you might want to know, and J.J., the doctor’s son, has opened a detective agency, following in his father’s crime-solving footsteps. Additionally, we learn a lot about medical issues, like lupus and breast implants, but we also enjoy getting acquainted with Tip, the family dog. Of course there are nefarious characters and an interesting setting. The book takes place in the mid-1990s, which I found intriguing. I looked up breast implant lawsuits and there were many in the mid-to-late 1990s. Apparently that is why this is the time-frame.

The plot moves rapidly. I read it yesterday afternoon sitting on a lawn chair on a beautiful September day. The next time I looked up, three hours had passed and I sighed and closed the book. A holiday afternoon well spent.

 You can find John Bishop's biography on his website

Hieroglyphics

 By Jill McCorkle

Algonquin     2020

320 pages     Literary

Hieroglyphics are ancient Egyptian writings composed of pictures. One reads through the pictures to try to understand the message. The hieroglyphics in the book by the same name by Jill McCorkle are the attempts to piece together the message of the lives of four people, Lil and  Frank, an elderly couple, Shelly, a single mother working as a court stenographer, and her young son Harvey, who is sure there is a ghost in their house.

Each chapter continues the story of one of the characters, each of whom have suffered from great loss in their lives. Each is in a constant struggle to create a life for himself/herself despite that loss. Lil  and Frank have moved from Boston to the North Carolina community where their daughter lives, and where Frank grew up. Lil is trying to put together a journal for her children as a way of explaining how her life happened, how she and Frank forged a life together, and how she wants to find peace before she dies. Frank, on the other hand, becomes obsessed with the house where he grew up and the root cellar where he stored his treasures. Shelly and Harvey now live in that house; Shelly refuses to let Frank come into the house, and Harvey worries that Frank may be one of the ghosts that has been haunting him.

The review in the New York Journal of Books has an stunning conclusion to its analysis of the book: “McCorkle is an insightful, skillful writer and these characters have led complex lives. She takes her time and lets them unpack their baggage slowly, a piece at a time. So when McCorkle suddenly speeds to and through the finish, with Jason—our least known character—making and revealing a major discovery, along with Lil’s revelations and what some may consider the quick end of the novel, is McCorkle suggesting that this is what happens with our lives? We think we’ll have time to make decisions, to work something out, but then, surprise! it’s over and we’re gone. We can go back and reread McCorkle’s ending, of course. No such privilege with our own.”

I am shocked that I had such a difficult time getting through Hieroglyphics. I identified completely with Lil and Frank, in part because of their age, and also because of the grief they carried. The concluding thought tore me through to the quick. “We think we’ll have time to make decisions, to work something out, but then, surprise! It’s over and we’re gone.” I think that I identified too closely with the theme. I found myself underlining passage after passage—brilliantly conceived and written by McCorkle. Her insights into the aging couple, the secretive and flawed Shelly, and scared little Harvey enmesh the reader completely into the lives of these characters. Here are a couple of passages that I found particularly moving.

“And now Frank does see. He understands how memories of what was good can be so painful you might choose not to look.”

Lil: “Sometimes I feel like my life is all laid out before me; dots connecting, patterns shaped and designed, words naming and classifying me.”

I grew nostalgic as I read Hieroglyphics. I realized that I have always been an extremely forward looking person, always trying to move ahead. Even when my husband died leaving me with 3 children, I moved us forward. I never dwelt on my grief—and perhaps unfortunately, never dwelt on my children’s grief. I said to my 40-something son yesterday that perhaps we should revisit Daddy, and share some memories of that time in our lives. The incredible thing about Hieroglyphics is that it put me in touch with my own pain and longing.

Thank you Jill McCorkle with giving a moment with myself that caused me to reflect on my life’s path.

Hieroglyphics was released in July to a great deal of acclaim. Here is the author’s website.