Such delicacy! If I would use one word to describe this book, delicacy would be it. A web of several people, bonded by an experience, where you are immersed in each of them for a brief moment of time, when you are able to see both the inside and outside of them, their strengths and their faults. And they grow on you, all of them. Especially Maryam, a grandmother of little Susan. Or Sooki when she got to America.
Take a childless American family. Who would they be? Maybe Donaldsons, what you would call typical Americans, maybe not WASPs, but white and blond, certainly. And they adopt little Jin-Ho, a girl from Korea. Now, already that might prove a difficult cultural challenge. But Yazdans are also Americans. Both of them descedants of Iranian immigrants, the first generation to be born and raised in the US. And they also adopt a little girl from Korea. That is Sooki. Now, what kind of cultural challenge will they have?
Well this is not the book about the tragedy that gets to the evening news, this will not be the trauma for everybody involved. This is what happens when everything is actually going as it should. Not that there are no challenges. Bitsy Donaldson, the mother of Jin-Ho is the one who is creating a completely new sort of social customs centered on the Arrival Party, where both families meet in order to celebrate the arrival of the girls. And Yazdans who look up to her.
Surely, there is alienation, surely there are misunderstandings. But here, people try their best to be kind, they try their best to read others and accomodate them. Everyone of them is gentle and affirmative. Life is difficult as it is, even without war, the vanity fair and other social power games. You get sick, you heart gets broken, people die anyway, you may not like somebody and think that they are dumm and ignorant and immoral and . . . just fill in the gaps.
But at the bottom of all of it is the shared experience of what it means to be a human. Or to be an American in this case. You get the glimpse of an immigrant experience, of the revolution in Iran in 1979 and its aftermath, of the September 11, of Islam, of differences between generations, of adoption issues, of family dynamics, of arranged marriages, of individuals. Everything mixed together. One issue seen from so many angles. Life seems to be so much richer than what we imagine it to be. To be American is so much richer than what it seemed to me before I have read the book.
I have felt such sympathy for Maryam and her feeling of foreignness to the adopted country. She arrived when she was 19 and at 63 still feels that way. And she frets what here little grandchild of Korean descent would feel in the future. And how this grandchild of hers feels about Christmas in a family with islamic traditions. And then, Dave, an American in the most stereotypical sense of the word gives her the answer.
“You can start to believe that your life is defined by your foreignness”, she said. “You think everything would be different if only you belonged. ‘If only I were back home’, you say, and you forget that you wouldn’t belong there either, after all these years. It wouldn’t be home at all anymore”.
Her words struck Dave as profoundly sad, but her voice was cool and her profile remained impassive. A yellow glow kept flickering across her face as guests passed between the car and the front-walkway lamp.
Dave said, “Maryam.”
She turned and observed him from a distance, it seemed, her expression friendly but contemplative.
“You belong,” he told her. “You belong just as much as I do, or, who, or Bitsy, or . . . It’s just like Christmas. We all think the others belong more.”
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