Teoh Yun Ling

Angelica Lee Sin-je in “The Garden of Evening Mists”

Yun Ling is born in 1923 to a Chinese trader in rubber, in Penang, Malaysia. Her family speaks English. She has a sister, Yun Hong, and a brother. Though the family have moved up into the hills when the Japanese invade in 1940, Yun Ling and her sister are taken to a prison camp in the jungle. Yun Hong, considered the more beautiful, is chosen as a “comfort woman” and imprisoned in a separate hut. Yun Ling is made to work in the mines, until she becomes a cook in the officers’ mess.

As a cook, Yun Ling has more privilege. She sneaks out to talk to her sister through a window. Yun Hong reminds Yun Ling of the beautiful gardens they once saw in Kyoto, and together they imagine a garden they will build. When Yun Ling is caught stealing food, the camp director cuts off two of her fingers. A doctor helps her survive, and she begins to learn Japanese. 

Yun Ling is chosen as an interpreter and when the war is over, a Japanese director blindfolds her and drives her out of the camp, telling her to forget everything. Yun Ling tries to go back to get her sister, but she gets lost and from a high peak, she watches the Japanese detonate the mine with the prisoners inside. No trace of the camp is left.

After the war, Yun Ling works for a war crimes tribunal, trying to determine where the camp was. She is sacked after a few months, but then goes to Girton College in England to study law. At loose ends when she returns, she goes to visit a tea estate in the highlands, run by a Boer, Magnus Praetorius, a friend of her family. Magnus points out the garden of Nakamura Aritomo below. Aritomo had been a gardener for the emperor of Japan, but exiled himself after a dispute. Visiting the garden, Yun Ling asks Aritomo to design a memorial garden for her sister. He refuses, but suggests she apprentice to him to learn how to do it herself.

Yun Ling works hard on the garden, Yugiri, learning much and becoming more than an apprentice to Aritomo. It is the time of the “Malayan emergency” when communists are trying to take over. Yun Ling has several encounters with terrorists, and when she recovers, her father asks her to come home to Kuala Lumpur. She refuses and moves into Aritomo’s house in the garden.

Aritomo also creates woodblock prints. When the rains begin and they can no longer work in the garden, he tells Yun Ling he wants to make a horimono, a full-body tattoo, on her. “Only on my back,” she says. He works on it, an hour at a time. Yun Ling finds that when she is feeling the pain of the needles, the clamor in her mind is deadened.

The “emergency” continues. Terrorists come to the house and tear the place apart. They drive Aritomo and Yun Ling up to the tea plantation, where they harass Magnus and his wife. They believe the Japanese buried treasure somewhere in the hills and want to know where it is. Magnus says he knows and the terrorists take him with them, leaving the others. His body is found a few days later.

The horimono finished, Aritomo practices archery in the evening. He and Yun Ling go for evening walks. One evening he says he wants to be alone. He turns back to look at the garden, but disappears. No trace of him is ever found.

Yun Ling goes to Kuala Lumpur and becomes a barrister and then a judge. She cannot bear to think of the garden, Yugiri. It becomes neglected. But after many years, Yun Ling finds she has aphasia. She will lose her language abilities within a year. She retires from her position and moves back to Yugiri, where she thinks about her life and begins writing a memoir of the time she spent with Aritomo.

She also entertains the art dealer Yoshikawa Tatsuji, who is writing a book about Aritomo. He wants to include the woodblock prints Aritomo has created. He is also entranced when Yun Ling shows him the horimono on her back. He produces a contract in which he agrees to collect it upon her death. Yun Ling realizes that Aritomo must have known about the prison camp, about the treasure the Japanese hid there and that he has made a map of the location on her back.

Yun Ling decides that Yugiri is the memorial garden she must keep for her sister. She also decides that she must make sure that no one gets their hands on her horimono.

Beautifully told in The Garden of Evening Mists [2011] by Tan Twan Eng, the story of Yun Ling and Aritomo is rich with complexity and mystery. Taoist teachings are threaded throughout. Making a Japanese garden using the principles of Zen in the midst of a jungle does not seem easy, but Aritomo is equal to the art. We also get a sense of the peoples who have made Malaysia their home, the folk cultures which sustain them and the violent history of the 20th century in Southeast Asia.

An angry young woman, Yun Ling never keeps her feelings to herself, expressing them in the crisp, precise English she has been taught. She dissembles while a prisoner, of course, but after the war does what she can to seek justice. And she comes to a kind of peace in the presence of the artist, Nakamura Aritomo. It is a satisfying journey, told in the first person so that we are always privy to Yun Ling’s inner life. My simple retelling only points to the exquisite experience of this wonderful novel.

Silvia

Tea Obreht

Eleven-year-old Silvia comes with her mother to live in Island City, reminiscent of Manhattan in the not too distant future. They move into The Morningside, a luxury high-rise hotel, with Silvia’s Aunt Ena, the building’s supervisor. Arriving from somewhere in the Balkans, they are part of a repopulation program aiming to balance the thinning density of the ruined city.

Silvia is put on a long wait list for a place in school. In the meantime, she helps her mother and aunt and listens to Ena’s tales of what “back home” was like, and the magical world beneath everyday reality. She is especially intrigued with a woman who lives in the penthouse, Bezi Duras, a painter who goes out at night with her three large, black dogs. Aunt Ena believes she is a Vila, an enchantress, also from “back home.”

Because her mother will tell her nothing about her origins, Silvia listens to Aunt Ena’s stories and is thrilled with the photographs and scrapbooks Ena keeps. She makes “protections” from three meaningful items and tries to live within the “rules” Ena, as well as her mother, set out. Ena dies suddenly, while working, and Silvia’s mother quietly takes over as the building supervisor.

When skulking around the base of the elevator to the penthouse, Silvia meets Louis May who offers her a key in exchange for letters which may have accumulated in the building for him. Silvia, who wants to discover whether the Vila’s dogs turn into men during the day so she can prove it to her mother, takes him up on it. When she does take the elevator, she finds herself in a courtyard, not in the building.

Silvia is thrilled when a girl about her own age moves into the building with her parents. Mila is a rude, brazen girl, however, uninterested in the careful rituals Silvia has built to investigate the world beneath the everyday world. Together they follow Ms. Duras and her three dogs one night, but this does not result in any certainties other than frightening Silvia’s mother.

To make ends meet, Silvia’s mother takes a job diving for building reclamation projects. At this time, people are given rations each day. They have generally agreed not to eat meat and everyone in the city listens to a radio program relaying local news called “The Dispatch.” Silvia mops floors and takes requests from building residents. She also helps cater a meeting and a party at the penthouse, scandalized by the lavish platters of meat that emerge from a basement warehouse.

When a building collapses that Silvia’s mother is working in, Silvia is certain she isn’t dead, though it takes three days for rescuers to find her in an air pocket. During this time, Silvia stays with Mila’s parents and is befriended by Mila’s father. After her recovery, Silvia’s mother wants to thank them. She bakes a small cake and takes it to them. When she sees Mila’s father, however, she is horrified and demands that Silvia come away with her.

They escape in Ena’s small, battered car, but don’t get far. Silvia remembers Louis May, and they take refuge in his apartment. He turns out to be the dispatcher and Silvia’s mother tells all of Island City that Mila’s father is the war criminal who sent refugees, including Silvia’s father, in buses to “work,” though they were never heard from again. How could Island City allow such a man to live there?

The tables are turned, however, when Mila disappears and her father insists that Silvia’s mother has something to do with her kidnapping, holding up her photo to television cameras. Silvia and her mother cut and bleach their hair, hiding out at Louis May’s. Silvia is certain that Mila is not dead, though she does not return.

Years later, when she is 18, Silvia has moved out west, living in a cabin where there are still elk and eagles to be seen. Silvia’s mother visits from her home on the southern coast and they finally talk about the past. Her mother didn’t want Silvia to listen to Ena’s folkloric “nonsense,” telling Silvia that her family had grown up in a beautiful place of community and peace. But when it collapsed during the war, she couldn’t bear to think of it. She accepts the fact she can’t give Silvia what she has had, and that Silvia won’t be able to give her children what she has had either.

The sun shone, however, despite the fires in the west and the rising seas, and the night sky was full of an infinity of stars. Louis May, who also lives in the west, has caught some trout and is making them a beautiful dinner.

Silvia’s story is told in The Morningside [published 2024], Tea Obreht’s third novel. Obreht’s prose is rich and realistic with such a sense of wholeness that Silvia’s endless anxieties are at the same time grounded in the certainty that she will be taken care of. Obreht gives ample evidence to show us how refugees come in at the bottom of the pecking order, and are often duped. Without a strong sense of home, this makes things difficult. But Obreht’s powerful human values stand behind Silvia’s tenuous hold on the world, and we are rooting for her!

Catherine Kemble Hudson

Woman Standing 1840-1850, Jean Baptiste Corot

Catherine Hudson, of English and Irish stock, came from New England to Patagonia with her husband Daniel in the 1830’s. At first they lived on a small ranch with a herd of cattle. In 1846, when her son William Hudson was five years old, the family moved further south near the Chascomús lake and established a pulperia. This was a general store where people met to eat and drink and also stay. We learn of Hudson’s parents from his book Far Away and Long Ago, published in 1918.

The new place felt vast to Hudson, set on the perfectly flat pampas among trees, which included 400-500 peach trees and a few quince. He doesn’t tell us exactly how many brothers and sisters he had, but it seemed they grew up together. “Our parents seldom or never punished us, and never, unless we went too far in our domestic dissensions or tricks, chided us. This, I am convinced, is the right attitude for parents to observe, modestly to admit that nature is wiser than they are and to let their little ones follow, as far as possible, the bent of their own minds.”

As a child Hudson raptly studied the creatures around him, especially the birds. Catherine noticed that he often went off by himself and worried, until she secretly followed him and found that he was only absorbed in study of some insect or bird. “And as she loved all living things herself, she was quite satisfied I was not going queer in my head.” When Hudson, at six, first confronted the death of his dog, Catherine comforted him with her own strong belief that death was not the end.

Hudson tells us that Catherine was “clever and thrifty,” making peach preserves which lasted all winter. She also made peach pickles, which were unusual. Even in a country where hospitality was practiced everywhere, Hudson never found an equal to what his parents laid out for their guests, both humble and great.

Hudson tells us of a particular evening, when a young gentleman joined them from Spain. After dinner he played the guitar as everyone gathered in front of the fire. He told them he was reminded of his own family’s evenings, and that he was surprised that this feeling should come to him so far from home, on the “great, naked pampas, sparsely inhabited, where life was so rough, so primitive.” Catherine listened raptly. The evening was, for Hudson, an example of the harmonious home his mother and father had made for him.

The family made occasional trips to Buenos Ayres, but Hudson does not tell us much about his mother’s activities in town. It was ruled in Hudson’s early years by Juan Manuel de Rosas, a powerful dictator who had, at least, kept the lawless territory relatively peaceful.

Hudson’s father was fearless, but also believed in the goodness of those around him. This led to him losing the large estate with its pulperia. The family had to return to their original ranch. Hudson himself had typhoid, a long illness through which his mother nursed him, but then rheumatic fever. He was afraid he would not live long, afraid he would not be able to enjoy the natural world, which meant so much to him. He was about sixteen, and in fact had many years left to him. His mother did not, however. She died shortly after his illnesses, in 1859.

Hudson found that their neighbors also missed his mother greatly. Though she was a Protestant and they were Catholic and strange to her, she would sit with them, “at ease in their lowliest ranchos, interesting herself in their affairs as if they belonged to her. This sympathy and freedom endeared her to them.”

Hudson regained his strength and began publishing his work on ornithology. He left for England at age 33, and remained there, writing prolifically. He wrote of his early life, the world of nature and is especially known for his novel Green Mansions. 

I first read Long Ago and Far Away perhaps fifty years ago. I was charmed by Hudson’s picturesque story of life in Argentina and the idyllic life of his family. After this, I had trouble finding the book. Recently I found both a digital copy and an audio version by LibriVox readers, available here. Hudson wrote of his mother many years after her death and perhaps gives us an idealized version, but his childhood memories sustained him while living many years in London and I don’t doubt their substantial truth.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt did not know she was precocious growing up. “I thought everyone was like me,” she says. She was born near Hanover, in 1906, but her parents shortly moved to Konigsberg to live with her grandparents. Her father died when she was seven. In school, in Konigsberg, she learned what it meant to be Jewish in Germany.

At first she went to the university at Marburg, and became involved with her professor, the charismatic and eloquent Heidegger.  “Being is hazardous,” said Heidegger. “The ground is trembling, but this lack of meaning is what makes life so vital and real.” She moved on to the University of Heidelberg, where she completed a dissertation on St. Augustine, under Karl Jaspers in 1929. Both of these teachers led Arendt to what she called “passionate thinking.” 

In 1929 she married Gunther Stern, like her headed toward an academic career. But by this time, it was almost impossible for them to find work. As more repression began, things became very difficult for Jews in Germany. Stern moved to Paris in 1931, but Arendt used their apartment in Berlin as a way-station for people trying to leave. She was arrested in 1933 for work documenting anti-Jewish propaganda. When she was freed after eight days, she walked out of Germany and into exile in Czechoslovakia.

Arendt looked for practical work in Paris. She had watched her university friends accommodate themselves to Hitler and she vowed not to get further involved with academia. She decided that if she was attacked as a Jew, she must fight as a Jew. She worked with Jewish organizations, including Youth Aliyah, doing fund-raising and helping young people move to Palestine. Arendt was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. Her mother had joined her in Paris, but her marriage was only a formality. She and Stern divorced.

Arendt met Heinrich Blucher, a working-class, self-taught philosopher, poet and activist, in Paris, “a political street fighter.” She found she could keep faith both with herself and with him. They married in 1940. “Where you are, there is my home,” she wrote to him.

Hannah was made to report for internment as France capitulated to Germany. She was sent to a camp in Gurs, in southern France with about 7,000 other women. The chaos was so great, however, that she managed to escape to Montauban, where she met her husband, and also her mother. With help from the American Varian Fry, they were able to get papers to get to Lisbon and then a ship to New York in 1941.

In New York, Arendt and Blucher participated in the vibrant life around them, gathering a tribe of fellow refugees and making many friends. Arendt excelled at loyalty, friendship and honesty. She said later that she wasn’t surprised by the persecution of Jews, but when they learned about Auschwitz in 1943, “that was the real shock. We could not believe it.”

Though she worked for Jewish organizations, Arendt was never a Zionist. She thought the creation of a state for Jews only would make hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. She had accepted being a “pariah” and found there was a certain warmth among her fellow Jews. But when the Israeli state was created, the warmth disappeared.

Arendt saw herself as a political theorist, not a philosopher. She began work on The Origins of Totalitarianism, her first major book, published in 1951. In it she says that the true existential crisis at the root of totalitarianism is loneliness. Loneliness had become the everyday experience of the masses, crushing them. In the modern world, labor and consumption alone throw us back on ourselves and make us lonely. Consumption takes the place of all truly relating activities.

Arendt was also teaching at many institutions, though she would not accept tenure-track positions, preferring to be independent. In her classes she said, “I don’t want you to empathize. I want you to understand.” We can’t change human suffering, but we can make it articulate. The table we sit around, she told her seminars, is the world. She was trying to remake the common world. She was not interested in people’s existential relationship to themselves as much as to each other. This was the true experience of freedom and true politics.

When Adolf Eichmann was brought to trial in Jerusalem, Arndt offered to cover the trial for The New Yorker. Reading his many pages of defense, Arendt laughed aloud. She thought he was a clown. Her ironic treatment of the trial was misunderstood by many and Arendt got a lot of backlash. The trial was a public event which brought the Holocaust to world-wide notice, and made Arendt well-known.

Traveling back to Germany to help reclaim treasures stolen by the Nazis, Arendt re-connected with Heidegger. She did not wish to return to Germany, but she did enjoy speaking German, and hearing it on the street. In 1950 she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. She continued to write and teach. Her husband Blucher died in 1970, and her own ill-health began in 1974. She died the following year, of a heart attack.

Lyndsey Stonebridge presents much of Arendt’s thought, as embodied in her life in We Are Free to Change the World [published 2024]. She points out Arendt’s stubborn insistence on reality, her fearlessness. The life of the mind doesn’t harden as it matures, but is responsive, always ready to look again. 

There are many biographies of Hannah Arendt, and I especially enjoyed an interview she gave in 1964, which you can watch here. Her thought seems to me to be particularly relevant today because of her insistence that we live in the world with others. She felt that violence is always a failure of politics. Freedom cannot be forced. It can only be experienced in the world and alongside others.

Anna Bont Frith

Geraldine Brooks

Anna Frith is 20 when plague comes to the village of Eyam, Derbyshire, England, in 1665. She is the main witness to what becomes of her village, as recounted in Geraldine Brooks’ historical novel Year of Wonders [published 2001]. Though many of the characters are based on research, this is a fictionalized account.

As a child Anna lost her mother early and her father treated her badly. She is married at 15 to Sam, a miner for lead, the chief work of the village. They are happy and have two sons. Anna is also in service to the Bradfords, the landed gentry, and to the new rector, Michael Mompellion. Mompellion’s wife Elinor teaches Anna to read, as Anna loves language, and also about the herbs in her garden.

When her husband is killed in a mining accident, Anna takes in a boarder, Mr. Viccars, a tailor. Viccars orders a bolt of cloth from London, opens it and soon is dead from plague. He tells Anna to burn his belongings, but villagers come to take some of the clothing he has made. Thus plague spreads throughout the village.

Horrified, the Bradfords leave, but Mompellion convinces his church flock to quarantine themselves. He sets up a system of exchange at a boundary stone, where local gentry will supply them, if they do not leave. Everyone agrees.

Anna’s two sons die, one after the other. She is lost, wondering why she is still alive. Spending time in the churchyard, she sees people torturing the local herbalist/midwife and her niece, whom they call “witches.” They have consorted with the devil and brought the plague. They hang the younger woman and her aunt dies of consumption and exposure. Mompellion tries to stop them. “Do we not have suffering enough here.”

Because there are no longer midwives in the village, Elinor asks Anna to assist at a birth. She is reluctant, but successfully helps a boy to be born. Death is all around, however. Anna goes to ask her father for help, but he belittles her. Why does God take good people and leave evil ones like her father, she wonders.

Anna and Elinor become nurses to villagers while Mompellion ministers to their spirits. They go to the physic garden kept by the “witches,” trying to learn what they can. Anna experiments with poppies, lulling herself with lovely dreams, but then realizes she must be awake to help people. Working with Elinor gives her serenity. Elinor tells Anna her own story, of becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Mompellion saved her.

With Elinor’s determination and Anna’s knowledge, the two of them manage to save the mine of nine-year-old Merry, the last of her family, by extracting enough lead to fill a “king’s dish.” The miners’ barmote court also sentences Anna’s father for stealing, however, and he is left to die. The villagers all succumb to fear. Some take to flagellating themselves. Anna’s step-mother Aphra sells charms as the ghost of one of the “witches.”

The villagers begin meeting for church outdoors at a distance from each other. Mompellion realizes they should burn their possessions, which they do in July 1666, about a year after the plague began. After a few weeks they realize no one else has died. Anna envies the love between Mompellion and Elinor and rues her own lonely state.

Aphra has gone mad, however, after a harsh punishment and losing her last child. She arrives for the service of thanksgiving wielding a knife. Mompellion and Elinor try to soothe her, but she fatally cuts Elinor’s neck. 

Mompellion is prostrate, all his strength gone. He throws down his Bible.  Anna tries to take care of him, but after many weeks gives up. She goes out to his spirited horse and takes it for a ride. When she returns, Mompellion kisses her. He apologizes for his excessive grief. They sleep together, but when Mompellion tells Anna that he had held himself away from Elinor because of her sin and the need for atonement, Anna is horrified by his coldness.

Anna goes to the church, where she finds Miss Bradford. She begs Anna to go to her mother who is having a difficult birth. Anna succeeds in midwifing a little girl. But the daughter tries to drown the baby, a bastard. Anna says she will take the baby away and never come back. The Bradfords give her jewels, and Mompellion lets her take his horse, as she will be in danger. Anna spurns protection and takes the first ship, which is bound for Venice. After a difficult voyage, they end up on the north coast of Africa, at Oran.

It seems to Anna that she should continue to learn healing. She has also had a daughter of her own, by Mompellion. She is taken into the household of a compassionate doctor and helps him in healing women as she raises her two daughters. It is difficult for her to get used to the sun and light, but she insists she will never go back to England.

Geraldine Brooks was a foreign correspondent in recent places of terrible conflict, Bosnia, the Middle East, Africa. She wanted to write about the question of who people become under the worst circumstances. In making Anna a witness to what happens in her village which, even today, plays up its status as a plague village, Brooks is able to explore many dark places. The book is not easy to read, but it does delve into the question.

Ruth McBride Jordan

James McBride and Ruth MacBride Jordan

Ruth Jordan was born in Poland in 1921. Two years after her birth, her father, a Jewish rabbi, moved the family to America, where they led an itinerant life until settling in Suffolk, Virginia, where they started a grocery and dry goods store.

Growing up, James McBride knew nothing of his mother’s story. She refused to speak of it. But slowly, he got her to tell it, writing it down for us in The Color of Water, published in 1995.

Ruth’s father made she and her brother do all the work of the store when they weren’t in school. As a Jew, Ruth felt isolated. The store was in a black neighborhood and customers were cheated. Ruth’s father had no respect for them, but Ruth found them peaceful and trusting. He also abused Ruth sexually. Her brother ran away at 15 and Ruth herself went to New York at 17 to live with relatives.

Ruth was fascinated by Harlem which was “magic” at the time. She found work as a manicurist up there, but Dennis McBride, whom she met at her aunt’s leather factory, knew how much trouble she could get into and was appalled. He began asking her out, but he didn’t want to marry. “In the South, I could be shot for marrying you,” he said. He took Ruth to the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem where everyone loved Pastor Abner Brown. Dennis sang in the choir. Ruth converted to Christianity. “My world expanded in every way.” Ruth finally felt loved.

Living in a one room apartment, Dennis and Ruth had four children. “It was the happiest time in my life,” Ruth told her son. They applied for an apartment in the new Red Hook project in Brooklyn and got in. They had their own bathroom finally. The place was integrated, lovely, in Ruth’s eyes. She and Dennis started a prayer meeting in their living room (which was still going 40 years later). They had three more children, and one on the way in 1957, when Dennis died of lung cancer.

Ruth was shocked and scared. Many people helped them, but times were hard. She did not want to be on welfare. When Ruth asked her Jewish family for help, they told her, no. “We sat shiva for you. You are no longer part of our family.” When Ruth’s mother was dying, she was not allowed to see her.

Soon enough, however, another black man, Hunter Jordan, tall, capable and half Indian, wooed Ruth and her eight children. He took his life savings and bought the family a house in Queens. He couldn’t live in their chaos, however, and came on weekends to see Ruth and her kids, and help out. He and Ruth had four more kids, bringing the total to 12.

Ruth established a powerful framework for her family. She didn’t socialize, except in church. She had a distrust of authority and insisted on privacy. The kids were not to talk about themselves to others. Ruth had seen a lot of prejudice, but she never responded to it. The only things important to her were church and school. “What’s money if your mind is empty?” was her refrain.

Ruth went to every free museum and event she could find in New York, traveling on the subways with a gaggle of her black children in tow. She scanned the school programs, to get her kids into the best schools, usually Jewish, and sent them to camp in the summer. She insisted they all get good grades. She was a poor housekeeper and cook, but she didn’t care what the world thought of her. She refused to acknowledge her whiteness. “I’m light skinned,” she said.

When Ruth was 51, her second husband had a stroke. She was devastated. She went to work at the Chase Manhattan Bank as a secretary, still slim and pretty. At home, she designated the oldest kid the “king” or “queen,” the authority. The house was “organized chaos,” where the kids were always hungry, always debating. Civil rights and black power were the order of the day. The kids did not consider themselves poor or deprived. As they began to grow up they found the best college scholarships they could and often went on to become doctors and professors.

Ruth’s son James reports that all of his siblings had some color confusion. “Is God black or white?” “God is the color of water,” Ruth told the kids. She communicated her Jewishness through her respect for education. In 1974, the family moved to Delaware. James played in jazz bands, became a journalist.

James felt he needed to get to know his mother so as to know himself. He applied all his journalistic skills to her life, visiting Suffolk, Virginia and turning up her old friends. He published The Color of Water to great acclaim. It helped Ruth face her past. Ruth went on to get a degree in social work at Temple University in 1986 and settled in Ewing, Pennsylvania. At Christmas, all of James’ siblings collected at her house, anxious to recreate the madcap, color-blind, sophisticated atmosphere in which she had brought them up. Ruth died in 2010.

I loved this story of a young girl moving from the darkness of a family trying to survive without love, to the blazing light of its abundance. Ruth McBride Jordan built a life with two wonderful husbands and a dozen kids. They felt that “education, tempered by religion, was the way to pull yourself out of poverty.”  She was fearless in moving about New York and fierce when her children got in trouble. “Educate your mind,” she told her children. And they did.

Hattie Kong

Gish Jen

Hattie Kong is born in Shandong province, China, her father a distant descendant of the Confucius family. Her mother is a Christian missionary. When she is 16, the cultural revolution begins and Hattie is sent away, to family in Iowa. But Iowa is a monoculture at this time, and a family in Massachusetts is found for her to live with as an exchange student. She hears nothing from her parents.

Hattie grows up in the Hatch family, falling in love with Carter, the middle son, and investigating natural phenomena with him. It is Dr. Hatch who convinces Hattie to go into science. “You’re curious, interested in reality. Even the nature of our blindness interests you.” Dr. Hatch has a lab which Carter eventually runs. Hattie is hired, designing experiments to investigate Carter’s questions about the brain’s evolution. They have a brilliant partnership.

But science is competitive. Dr. Hatch thinks Hattie and Carter’s relationship is dangerous to the lab. Carter does not stand up for her. Hattie has to leave. She eventually finds her way to teaching, marrying Joe, a history teacher, and making a best friend of another teacher, Lee. Hattie and Joe have a son. 

When World and Town [2021], the novel by Gish Jen which tells Hattie’s story, opens, Hattie is 68. Her husband and best friend have died and she has moved to Riverlake, a small town in Vermont where the Hatches used to summer. She lives alone with her dogs and spends her time painting. She also has a group of friends who walk together and do yoga. It doesn’t feel like enough. She is as lonely as she has ever been.

In addition, Hattie’s Chinese relatives keep insisting that her parents, buried in Iowa, must be moved to the Kong family cemetery in China. The relatives are having misfortunes which they feel are due to this disrespect to family members.

A Cambodian family moves into a double-wide trailer, on a property just below Hattie’s windows. She makes friends with them, especially the young girl, Sophy, who speaks English well. And Carter appears in the town, having retired. He is building boats. The town is resisting a cell phone tower, and a big box discount store. Carter comes up with the best defense against the discount store at a town meeting. “The world has come to town.”

Sophy becomes the unwitting accomplice in a complicated family feud, fueled by a woman’s attempts to secure her family farm against her husband. The inability of the members of Sophy’s own family to find places in the town result in a horrendous beating. Hattie watches, helpless but open. When Sophy confesses to her, Hattie listens, tries to resolve the situation without bringing in the police, of whom the family is afraid. She enlists the help of her walking group, and Carter.

In the midst of this conflict, Carter admits he came to Riverlake to look for Hattie. She finds it hard to forgive him. He gave his life to science, not to her. He has also lost his wife. She tells him she left the lab because she needed a home. She was good with kids, teaching was satisfying. But Carter insists, “You can argue for the dignity of an ordinary life, but the higher precincts of science do make a person feel his dignity.” Hattie agrees that science, finding hard, repeatable results of experiments and sharing them, was wonderful.

When Carter turns up at the Cambodian family’s trailer with an excavator, to help with the drainage ditch the family is trying to build, the father quits his suicidal stance. The whole town is on hand, giddy with relief. They adopt the family into the town’s celebrations. Hattie watches the young people going to school at last. The woman who instigated the problems leaves town.

Hattie goes out to Iowa with a Chinese “bone picker” to retrieve her parents' urns. She sends them to Hong Kong to her relatives. They report that they are feeling a “big peace” once the ashes are interred in the Kong family cemetery. Carter moves in with Hattie. “They are the ones who lived.”

I loved Hattie, with her honesty, inability to believe in superstition and her tenacity. She makes moderate inroads into problems and doesn’t let go when times get tough. Though Carter has been in her thoughts her whole life, she had no expectation of seeing him again. Her late coming together with him is very moving.