Author: Taryn

“Before the war you understood the rules: avoid the government and you will be safe. After the war there were no rules, only chaos.”

In the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent civil war, over a million Iraqis poured over the Syrian border to escape the chaotic violence in their homeland. Writer Deborah Campbell traveled undercover to Syria in 2007 to interview the Iraqi refugees and show her readers the human face of the war. Foreign correspondents often use fixers who are native to the region to help navigate unfamiliar and often unwelcoming places. The fixers help navigate the bureaucracy and gain the trust of reluctant interview subjects, among other things. Campbell connected with Ahlam, an Iraqi refugee and fixer, who came with stellar recommendations. What begins as a professional relationship quickly evolves into a friendship.

Being a fixer is dangerous and there were indications that Ahlam was being watched. Campbell worried that she put Ahlam in harm’s way by employing her. Their worst fears were confirmed when Ahlam was taken from her home by a group of men and never returned. Did they take her because of her work as a fixer? Is it possible that Ahlam’s problems in Iraq followed her into Syria? Or even more terrifying–was she taken for no reason at all? During the months following Ahlam’s disappearance, Campbell uses all of her resources to discover where Ahlam was being held and what charges were being levied against her. The fact-finding mission is difficult and frustrating in a place where digging around too much can cause even more problems and one has to be careful who they trust.

What I strive to do is bridge the gap between the readers of the magazines I write for, such as Harper’s or The Economist, and people in troubled places who such readers would never otherwise meet. We talk about them, make policies to deal with them, even make war on them, while knowing almost nothing of who they are or what consequences our actions might have.

At heart, this book is about the friendship between a journalist and her fixer, so we get to know both women. Campbell describes what it’s like to be a foreign correspondent, both personally and professionally. Sometimes she struggles with her purpose. Is there any point what she’s doing when the past is already set in stone? Does making her readers feel something for the people she’s reporting on actually result in any meaningful action? Is she making things worse for people like Ahlam? Foreign correspondents also face many dangers and it’s best to stay under the radar. Campbell learns firsthand how the police state worms its way into one’s psyche and alters a person, even those who have the option to leave.

The star of this book is Ahlam. It’s worth it to read this book just to get to know her! She’s a fearless and capable person with a realistic perspective. Campbell describes her as a woman “whose power derived from no one but herself.” When the American troops arrived in Ahlam’s village just outside of Baghdad, she adapted to the new circumstances and worked alongside them. Her practicality made life better for her neighbors, but it also made her a target. She was kidnapped because her association with the Americans marked her as a traitor and spy. Her kidnappers released her after her family paid the $50,000 ransom and she promised to leave Iraq. (Note: Ransom payments typically result in automatic denial of a refugee application, because it counts as providing “material aid to terrorists.”) Even after the price she already paid for her activism, she was not content to recede into the shadows. After she fled to Syria and settled into the refugee community of Sayeda Zainab, also known as “Little Baghdad,” she continued her work as a fixer and set out to create a school for refugee children. She was determined to make a difference, even though group meetings were against the law and she sensed the authorities watching her.

Now that my belief in freedom of action, in agency, was gone, it seemed to me that it must have been an illusion all along. Just a luxury wrought by a worldview in which individuals believe they shape their own destinies—and a curse as well. In the West we are taught this from birth: that the course of our life is determined by how well we play our cards. The weak are weak because they did something wrong; the powerful have power because they earned it. Only now was I coming to understand the sense of fatalism so common in the East, where most of what happens is determined by forces beyond one’s control.

I expected this book to be more about Syria, but it’s just as much about Iraq. Campbell breaks down the complex history in an accessible way and outlines the path that led Syria and Iraq to their present-day situations. She describes the rural/urban divisions that led to Syrian Civil War and the fears Syrians had about the problems that might follow the constant influx of Iraqi refugees. With regards to Iraq, she shows the effects of removing a strong central power in a society with a deeply entrenched authoritarian culture without a strong institutional framework in place. Ahlam explains that Iraq “moved from one dictator to a multi-dictatorship system.” Campbell shows how the demographics of Iraq contributed to the chaos after the invasion. Centuries-old disputes boiled over and many times personal conflicts took cover under political ones. The violence between the various sectarian groups leads Ahlam’s brother, a driver, to carry four different identification cards. Choosing the wrong ID at a random stop could be fatal. The region has also long been plagued by the meddling of foreign governments, such as Western governments propping up of authoritarian regimes who advanced their financial interests and neighboring nations taking advantage of the instability for their own gain. Decades of ill-advised decisions and their unintended consequences worsened an already chaotic situation. Some of the decisions made thousands of miles away in Washington D.C. actually invigorated the Iraqi resistance and led to the formation of ISIS.

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I dreamed about the death journey of the salmon. The salmon, as it battles upriver to spawn, grows fangs and a snout, turning from Jekyll into Hyde. After spawning and giving up its life, it floats downstream, providing food for bears, eagles, trees, for every living thing. If the rainforest seemed like a vision of the deep past, Sayeda Zainab—Little Baghdad—seemed like the future. Masses of humanity, on the run from our own species and our uniquely destructive abilities. Here, I was about as far as it was possible to be from that place of natural cycles. Here, when someone died, it was almost always for nothing.

Ahlam maintains her humanity and integrity when everything around her is falling apart. She knows her work as a fixer is dangerous but is insistent that “someone has to open the door and show the world what is happening.” This book shows the human cost of conflict and “what survival looks like with all the scaffolding of normal life ripped away.” Most people just want to be left alone to raise their families in peace. Sometimes that means making previously unfathomable trade-offs, like accepting encroachments on their freedom to avoid war or joining an unsavory group that promises to feed and protect their families (if there was even a choice to begin with). As Alessandro Orsini says in his book Sacrifice, “If it protects you from violence, even a crappy society becomes desirable.” As people separate into opposing sides, those who exist outside those boundaries pay a high price. Campbell introduces us to the people who are stuck in the middle, the ones doing their part to rebuild their country and regain some semblance of stability with little support or resources. One story that really struck me was a man voluntarily donning his traffic guard uniform in an attempt to reign in chaos after the U.S. suspended Iraq’s traffic code.

At this point, I’ve read several books about the conflicts in the Middle East, from both American and Middle Eastern perspectives. A common theme ties them all together: the feeling of being forgotten. The terrible cost of war can be difficult to comprehend from thousands of miles away. Civilian responsibility and engagement shouldn’t end with the decision to go to war; everything that happens after that matters too. A Disappearance in Damascus is a reminder of our shared humanity and the enduring consequences of war. You can read Deborah Campbell’s articles on her website. To get a feel for this book, I recommend reading Exodus: Where Will Iraq Go Next (Ahlam is named Aisha in the article).

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If you are looking for more books about the region and its conflicts, you might be interested in the following books:
• Being Kurdish in a Hostile World by Ayub Nuri
• The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid by Will Bardenwerper – This is one of my favorite books! It gives insight into a Saddam Hussein’s mind and the enigmatic face of evil.
• Iraq + 100: The First Anthology of Science Fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq by Hassan Blasim – Ten short stories that envision Iraq in 100 years. There’s a scene in A Disappearance in Damascus where a man is fascinated by Ahlam’s humanity, because he had been taught that “Iraqis were all wild, like animals.” The anecdote instantly made me think of Kuszib by Hassan Abdulrazzak. One of Deborah Campbell’s contacts has a dim prediction for Iraq’s future:

“Even after ten years we won’t be back to zero,” he said, “because of the mentality of this new generation. This generation and the next two generations. They aren’t being educated anymore, they see nothing but violence. They’ve become easy to brainwash and they are caught between Saudi Arabia and Iran.”

• Verax: A Graphic History of Electronic Surveillance – Deborah and Ahlam both express the fear of being watched. This graphic novel discusses some of the mass surveillance technologies being sold to repressive governments like Syria. It also shows how the US government collects information on US citizens.
• I found Voices from Iraq: A People’s History 2003-2009 while looking to verify the “radicals putting underwear on sheep” anecdote. I haven’t read this one, but I want to.

Callie usually only visits her twin sister Tilda once a month, but Tilda has been inviting her over more often since she started getting serious with her new boyfriend Felix. Callie is thrilled to be included in her sister’s life. At first she finds Felix beguiling, but she begins to see signs that he’s abusive and controlling. Her once vibrant sister seems to be withering away, but Tilda refuses to entertain Callie’s concerns. Callie joins the ControllingMen.com forums for support, but the forum members are intense and she ends up getting in over her head. Her concerns about Felix are suddenly nullified when thirty-two-year-old Felix suddenly dies alone in his hotel room, just weeks after his and Tilda’s wedding. The cause of death is determined to be heart disease, but Callie thinks the circumstances of his death are suspicious. She’s convinced the police will be questioning her soon.

Tilda is a well-known actress, while Callie lives a quiet life and works at a bookstore. Tilda has always overshadowed Callie, even in childhood. It upsets Callie that people always assume that Tilda is her older sister. She’s been dominated by Tilda her entire life, but she wants to be seen as an equal. In the scenes from childhood, we see Tilda’s subtle cruelty to Callie. It’s obvious that she relishes in Callie’s unconditional adoration. Tilda has always been the stronger of the two girls, but seeing that Tilda could be in danger gives Callie the opportunity to be the rescuer. Callie’s idea of looking out for her sister is so creepy! She obsessively monitors her sister’s well-being and seems to want to literally consume Tilda’s essence. (You’ll see what I mean when you read it. Weird doesn’t even begin to describe it!)

As disturbed as I was by Callie’s behavior, I was also rooting for her! For all her odd quirks, she comes across as a sweet person. Callie has major self-confidence issues and is constantly comparing herself to Tilda. She berates herself for her social awkwardness and “vacant” life. She’s constantly admiring Tilda and Felix’s “fine bones, smooth, translucent skin, and shiny blond hair,” while belittling her own “round pinkish” body. From other characters’ statements, we see that Callie isn’t an objective observer. Callie is consumed by anxiety and has a tendency to catastrophize everything. She sees danger lurking in every corner. I didn’t know to what extent I could trust her perceptions, especially since she doesn’t even seem to trust herself.

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If you preferred the character-focused parts of this book, you might be interested in The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. It’s a different story and has less popular appeal, but some of the character traits in White Bodies made me think back to it: twins where one outshines the other, the relief Callie feels when trying on new identities, and the meek twin’s psychological reasons for swimming.

Ten short stories by Iraqi writers envisioning Iraq 100 years after the US-led invasion. I love short speculative fiction, but I was mostly interested in this book because I have a huge blind spot in my knowledge about Iraq. Everything I’ve read about Iraq has been from the perspective of the American military or Western journalists! I had trouble nailing down the central message of some of the stories, but I recognize this book’s importance. These futuristic tales provide insight into Iraq’s present-day situation from a much-needed perspective.

The best science fiction, they say, tells us more about the context it’s written in than the future it’s trying to predict. The future may offer a blank canvas onto which writers can project their concerns, in new and abstract ways, but the concerns themselves are still very much ‘of their time’.

In the introduction, Hassan Blasim explains that it was a challenge to collect stories for this compilation because science-fiction isn’t usually written in Iraq. Religious extremism and constant conflict don’t exactly provide a fertile ground for imaginative expression. This unique assignment allowed the writers to look at Iraq through “the long lens of speculative fiction.” While these stories are set one hundred years in the future, the 2003 invasion is never far from the writers’ minds. In some of the stories, Iraq is still occupied by foreign forces or grappling with the effects of the neverending conflict. In other stories, the war is so far behind them that the younger generation can’t even comprehend it. Each short story is written by a different author, but common threads run through many of them: suspicion of religion and strongman leaders, the selling off of everything, and the loss of history by either governmental decree or as an act of survival. In many of the stories, the United States has succumbed to its own problems with extremism. Futuristic technology is featured, but what interested me most were the humanistic aspects.

My favorite stories are bolded. For the stories that were more opaque to me, I just noted the parts that struck me as most important.

• Kahramana by Anoud – Sixteen-year-old Kahramana bravely escapes an arranged marriage to the head of the Islamic Empire. She flees to the American occupiers for safety, only to be used as propaganda and carelessly tossed aside when she outlives her usefulness.

Violence sculpts you and in this case turns you into half a statue. Violence is the most brutal sculptor mankind has ever produced. A barbaric sculptor: no one wants to learn lessons from the works he has carved.

• The Gardens of Babylon by Hassan Blasim – The narrator designs smart-games based on old stories. He’d prefer to design original smart-games, because he doesn’t see how the past has any relevance to him. With the help of a hallucinogenic drug to cure his creative block, he sees he has an unexpected connection to the past. Through the narrator’s research, we see the constantly shifting alliances and senseless, escalating violence that tore the nation apart.

• The Corporal by Ali Bader – An Iraqi soldier who was optimistic about the U.S. invasion is killed by an American soldier. After one hundred years in limbo, he convinces God to let him return to Iraq in place of a prophet. The world the soldier returns to is a completely different place; the United States is gripped by religious extremism, while Iraq is a secular utopia. The reversal of circumstances puts the resurrected soldier in a dicey situation.

• The Worker by Diaa Jubaili – The religious strongman who now leads Iraq urges the citizens to remain calm and appreciate their circumstances because their suffering could be much worse. As a mysterious figure wanders through the streets collecting corpses, we witness the full extent of suffering.

• The Day by Day Mosque by Mortada Gzar- People have resorted to selling their own snot. This one went completely over my head! I think the important parts are the commodification of everything (including biological waste), the ridiculousness of the urban improvement projects, and the absurdity of George W. Bush’s statement that “day by day, the Iraqi people are closer to freedom.”

You see, if you’re a sufferer of Baghdad Syndrome, you know that nothing has ever driven us, or our ancestors, quite as much as the syndrome of loving Baghdad.

These help regulate buy levitra deeprootsmag.org immune function, organs and glands and mind/emotions. Still, tadalafil prices cheap most patients have to live with the same problems. In addition, keep in mind that tab viagra works only when you are sexually stimulated. These inventions have viagra online no prescriptions provided easier means to treat ED, PDE5 inhibitors score the best. • Baghdad Syndrome by Zhraa Alhaboby – Architect Sudra Sen Sumer is diagnosed with Baghdad Syndrome, a disease that renders its victims blind. The specter of blindness makes him passionate about his latest commission to design a city square, because it might be the last project he’s able to see. Haunted by a vivid dream of a woman’s desperate plea to find her lover, he sets out to find the statue of Scheherazade that was looted from the square many decades ago and return it to its rightful home. Just as the woman was forcibly separated from her lover and the statue removed from the square, Iraqis were forced to flee their homes and deny their family history to survive. I think the title is a play on Stockholm Syndrome. Despite the horrors the Iraqi people have endured, they can’t abandon their beloved homeland.

‘History is a hostage, but it will bite through the gag you tie around its mouth, bite through and still be heard.’

• Operation Daniel by Khalid Kaki – All audio recordings of forbidden languages are banned “to protect the state’s present from the threat of the past.” Anyone possessing forbidden material is ground down into diamonds to adorn the Venerable Benefactor’s accessories. But can the past truly be erased?

To compose himself, Ur reminded himself of how pathetically humans had failed to work out the basics of intergalactic space flight, driving back his momentary fascination with the book and restoring his old feelings of revulsion towards these creatures. It was only when this feeling of superiority had a physical manifestation—a shudder of revulsion—that balance to his psyche was restored.

• Kuszib by Hassan Abdulrazzak – The extraterrestrial occupiers of Iraq are farming humans. The alien invaders easily rationalize their cruelty to the “uncivilized” humans. Ona realizes that some of the criticisms of humans could apply to her own species, but her superiors assure her that the humans are much worse. Ona feels sympathy for the poor humans, but she determines her own desires supersede the humans’ autonomy. This story is really strange (tentacles!), but the message is clear. It shows an invader deciding they know what’s best for the occupied territories and how they exert their will over those they deem beneath them.

“We call it the world whether it is our own world or that which we no longer know, the way it was before the year 2021. As if nothing changed.”

• The Here and Now Prison by Jalal Hasan – Everything from the past, including the dead, is relegated to the Old City, a place that can only be accessed by scholars. A young man suffering from a disease sneaks into the area to visit his dead mother. His girlfriend follows him and discovers the past is more vibrant than their present “where everything you touched became obsolete because you touched it, everything you said became a lie because you said it.” This story deals with the limitations of language in describing the state of things and how that makes us grow accustomed to bad circumstances without even realizing it.

• Najufa by Ibrahim Al-Marashi – A man takes a pilgrimage to Iraq with his grandfather Isa. Isa has never visited his ancestral homeland because of his own father’s experiences, so his grandson hopes to convince him there’s more to Najufa than bad memories. As Isa shares his memories with his grandson, we learn of the sectarian conflicts that consumed people after the 2003 invasion and the unbreakable spiritual connection one has to their homeland. There’s a passing reference to the Christian Assembly of Kansas and Arkansas (CAKA), a domestic terrorist group in the futuristic U.S. that rivals ISIS.

‘We’ve changed so much,’ Samir mused, as if asking himself a question.
‘The world changes and all we can do is try to keep up,’ Helen offered.
‘But have we changed for the better?’ Samir asked. (The Here and Now Prison)

This was a challenging read for me, but it was well worth my time. What I saw most in these stories is a yearning for a peaceful future. I didn’t fully understand every story, but that might be because of lack of knowledge about the region. Many of the stories came into sharper focus as I read more nonfiction about modern-day Iraq. Some of the strange little details were born from reality, such as the invaders disorienting the natives by renaming all the streets in “Kuszib.” These fictional stories also made my nonfiction reading even more impactful. After the compilation of these stories, the future of Iraq grew even more uncertain. Blasim reminds us in the “Afterword” that many of the stories were written before June 2014 when Iraq’s second largest city Mosul fell to IS. The Iraqi army recaptured Mosul in July 2017, but there’s still a long road ahead. (Washington Post: ISIS is near defeat in Iraq. Now comes the hard part)

If you are looking for more books by authors from the region, you might be interested in Ayub Nuri’s memoir Being Kurdish in a Hostile World. A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War was also very educational. It’s written by a Canadian journalist and is set in Syria, but it focuses on Iraqi refugees and familiarized me with some of Iraq’s history.

What good could come of knowing you’d fallen out of time, your whole life seized away from you?

Toronto, Canada in the 1980s: Three days have passed since anyone has seen Lily. She has always been prone to wandering off, but she usually returns within a few hours. She has never been missing for this long. Her daughter Rita has always resented her eccentric behavior, but Rita would forgive everything if she could just get her mother back. The police say there’s no evidence of a crime, so the burden is on Rita to search for clues to her mother’s whereabouts. Lily has never been open about her past; in fact, she denies the worst parts ever happened. Rita digs deeper into her mother’s history and discovers there’s much more to Lily’s story—and consequently, her own.

Matanzas Internment Camp, California in the 1940s: Lily has a history of memory problems. She had to dissociate to make it through her horrific childhood. When Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians were forced into internment camps during World War II, eighteen-year-old Lily was interred at Matanzas. She falls in love with the rebellious photographer Kaz and becomes close with his father, the camp doctor. She plays a role in the events leading up to the Matanzas Riot because of her desperate need to love and be loved. Torn between love and doing the right thing, her need to retreat into a fantasy world grows stronger. Is Lily even capable of knowing what the truth is?

Rita thought about the Japanese fairy tales Lily had once told her, all the stories of sudden disappearances and reversals of fortune. Girls who dropped iridescent eggs and accidentally killed their unborn children — their resplendent, palatial surroundings suddenly vanishing. Young men who opened boxes they’d been forbidden to look inside, only to be confronted by clouds of smoke and broken mirrors that revealed faces of old men. None of us are where we think we are. None of us are who we think we are. The present constantly disappears, time violently yanked away. That inevitable process of aging could be mysteriously — tragically — accelerated. So many of these tales were about lives evaporating, futures cancelled in a heartbeat.

This story was inspired by the author’s own family history. Leslie Shimotakahara is a fourth generation Japanese-Canadian whose grandparents were interned during World War II. Matanzas is a fictional place, but it’s loosely based on the actual Manzanar incarceration center. I was glad that I read George Omi’s memoir American Yellow right before this book, because it provided helpful context and vocabulary. After the Bloom book features an older character, so it gives more insight into the adult rivalries and resentments. The chapters alternate between Rita and Lily’s perspectives. Rita has never had a healthy relationship with her mother. When Lily acts helpless, Rita feels “this cruel, uncontrollable, animalistic urge to tear apart the little world her mother had fabricated out of tissue-paper lies and delusions.” Rita manages her time with Lily, because “too much chit-chat would only fill her with irritation or worse yet, that gnawing, empty feeling: they’d never see eye to eye on anything.” The differences between them seem unimportant now that Lily is missing. Rita is determined to find her mother. She’s also dealing with a recent divorce and insecurity over her six-year-old daughter spending time with her father and his new girlfriend. Lily’s chapters cover her time in the internment camp and the shaky rebuilding of her life afterward. Lily chapters are more focused and she’s the most interesting of the two characters, but she’s difficult to connect to because she’s so adrift. Her loose grip on reality and the way she is a supporting character in her own life makes her chapters feel fuzzy around the edges.

Nature on the verge of dying was often more beautiful than at the height of its bloom.

Secrets are kept to protect the secret-keeper and those around them, but sometimes knowing the truth can give people perspective and closure. Rita initially mocks the paranoia and conspiracies of her mother’s generation, but she realizes their fears are justified when she begins to dig deeper into her mother’s past. Men in dark suits were out to get them. Many of their family members were whisked away in the middle of the night to be interrogated, some of them never to be seen again. Family bonds were dissolved and generational wealth was lost. After they were released from the internment camps, they had to start from nothing in a hostile environment. Rita had experienced prejudice due to her Japanese descent, but she is shocked to hear about the level of discrimination suffered by Japanese-Canadians who are only a decade older than her. She was aware of the internment camps in the United States and Canada, but she had never considered the full extent of what her mother had been through. In context, Lily’s idiosyncratic behavior (the well-stocked wallet, extreme frugality) suddenly makes sense. Lily becomes more than just her mother, but also a young woman who came from nothing and raised two children alone. As a young mother and recent divorcée, Rita now realizes what incredible odds Lily faced. With a new understanding of Lily’s past, Rita may also come to understand how her family became so dysfunctional and why she and her brother had such different childhoods.

“Yeah? I’ve heard rumblin’ about that stuff. Sure, it was bad what happened, but we’ve all had to take the short end of the stick from time to time. That’s how history works — winners and losers. If all the losers wanted the government to write ’em a cheque, where’d the handouts stop?”
“Maybe if the government didn’t have its head up its ass so much, it wouldn’t have to keep writing cheques.”

Shame touches everyone in this story.
• As a child, Rita was sometimes ashamed of her heritage and her mother: “It was bad enough being Japanese. … The last thing she wanted was to be seen as both the Japanese girl and the girl with the crazy mother.” Now she is ashamed of her new status as a single mother and her drop in social class.
• Lily feels shame when she realizes how all of the men in her life have used her. It’s always been easier for her to tell people what they want to hear and she’s ashamed that she remained silent when it mattered the most.
• An entire generation is ashamed. In the internment camps, Lily watched “distinguished men reduced to beasts of burden.” When everyone was allowed to return to their lives, many were willing to do anything to assimilate, including hiding their culture:”Forget everything, turn the other cheek. Pull yourself up by your goddamn bootstraps.”  Some people were so ashamed of what happened to them that they withdrew from society completely.
It is estimated buy levitra without rx that around 30 million people in the United States suffer from erectile dysfunction and there could be no denying to this fact. http://cute-n-tiny.com/tag/vampire-bats/ online viagra So, if anybody is suffering from the above mentioned any disease and if you stay anywhere, then you may contact Best Sexologist. By no means viagra 25mg online exceed the recommended dosage as it won’t expand your moxie consider. If no any pregnant sign in levitra free sample one year, check your sperm quality. • Governments are ashamed of their actions and gloss over shameful events in their history books. The euphemistic view of the internment camps and the government propaganda efforts give those whose rights were never in question a privileged view of what happened: “No one had been comfortable with all those Japs living off the fat of the land anyway while the rest of America had suffered wartime shortages.” Rita is frustrated with the concept of the “model minority” and how some community members are exalted as examples of how polite and strong one should be after their rights have been trampled. Anyone who doesn’t behave the “correct” way is seen as the problem, rather than the thing they were forced to endure.

Everyone, perhaps, had these faint, staticky shadow selves following them around, like degraded clones. Yourself, but not yourself. Things you’d done, but couldn’t believe you’d done, would never acknowledge. Parts of yourself you couldn’t bear to own.

The ghosts of the past linger, long after they were thought to have been left behind. Rita and her brother always knew there was something wrong, but they had to pretend not to see it. Because of all the secrets and shame, Rita has to deal with a gaping hole in her family history, as well as a distant relationship with her mother. Both Rita and Lily develop some type of split self to deal with demanding circumstances. In order to move forward, both women need to deal with their pasts. Rita needs to work through her difficult relationship with her mother. Lily needs to deal with her past trauma and guilt. After the Bloom is about the things we do to survive and the things we do to live with ourselves. Do lies for the greater good actually benefit anyone or does it just extend the pain? Many of the characters try to forget the past to protect themselves and those around them. Is it better to forget or does remembering make us whole? No matter how much we might want to forget, the past can never be truly buried. The effects of the past reverberate through generations, whether we recognize it or not.

LINKS
• Book Trailer
• Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment – Photographs play a key role in the story. Photos can show what actually happened, but they can also be used to show what we want to see. Documentary photographer Dorothea Lange’s photos of the internment camps were confiscated by the U.S. military and hidden away in the National Archives until 2006.
• Manazar Riot/Uprising – The Matanzas Riot is loosely based on the 1942 Manazar Riot.
• Driven Underground Years Ago, Japan’s ‘Hidden Christians’ Maintain Faith – History is filled with people deemed as undesirable by their fellow citizens. Rita notices how Lily seems to shield herself with bigotry. It’s a reminder that these are not just isolated instances in history and that it’s important to look inside ourselves.
• The Redress Movement- A campaign to obtain restitution and an apology for the internment of Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians during World War II.
• The theme of collective amnesia reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant:

“I know my god looks uneasily on our deeds of that day. Yet it’s long past and the bones lie sheltered beneath a pleasant green carpet. The young know nothing of them. … Be merciful and leave this place. Leave this country to rest in forgetfulness.”

“Foolishness, sir. How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery? I see how devoutly you wish it, for your old horrors to crumble as dust. Yet they await in the soil as white bones for men to uncover.”

There are things even love can’t do. Before I got married, I believed love could do anything. … If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love. (Akin)

After four years of marriage, Yejide and Akin still haven’t had a child. Akin’s family pressures him to take on a second wife who can provide him with descendants. Polygamy was never part of their plan, so Yejide is livid when a second wife appears at her doorstep. She becomes desperate to get pregnant in order to protect her marriage. Stay with Me is an emotional story about the slow disintegration of a relationship and the damage that societal expectations can inflict.

It was the lie I’d believed in the beginning. Yejide would have a child and we would be happy forever. The cost didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how many rivers we had to cross. At the end of it all was this stretch of happiness that was supposed to begin only after we had children and not a minute before. (Akin)

This is such an emotional read! It made my stomach feel tied up in knots. My heart hurt so much for these characters because of the burdens they were forced to face. Part of me is so thrilled to find a talented new author to follow, but the other part of me is angry that she put her characters through so much pain! When we first meet Yejide, it’s 2008 and she’s still married to Akin. However, it seems that they’ve not communicated over the last fifteen years. She has just received an invitation to be Akin’s guest at his father’s funeral. The chapters alternate between Akin and Yejide as they reveal the story of their relationship, from love at first sight to the challenges that followed. The story of their relationship coincides with the tumultuous presidency of Ibrahim Babangida (1985-1993). Through the many twists and turns in this story, Yejide and Akin suffer a never-ending series of setbacks. Sometimes it felt like too much, but I think that feeling is intensified by the way the reveals are distributed. Each tragedy results from the one before it, but the answers aren’t revealed linearly.

The reasons why we do the things we do will not always be the ones that others will remember. Sometimes I think we have children because we want to leave behind someone who can explain who we were to the world when we are gone. (Yejide)

Yejide has always been alone in the world. Her mother died during her birth and her father likes to remind her of her part in her mother’s death. Her father’s other wives ostracize her. Yejide’s mother is described as a woman without lineage, which makes them question Yejide’s humanity: “when there was no identifiable lineage for a child, that child could be descended from anything—even dogs, witches or strange tribes with bad blood.” When she falls in love with Akin, she finally has a person that is hers and an opportunity to create a family for herself. She finally matters to someone! Everything falls apart when Akin agrees to take on a second wife and she gets crowded out of her own life. Now she must have a child. It will secure her place in the marriage and give her something that is really hers: “A man can have many wives or concubines; a child can have only one mother.”
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It’s the truth—stretched, but still true. Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist? (Akin)

There’s intense love between Akin and Yejide, but they also share have a fear of being alone. There are issues in their relationship from the beginning. Akin is constantly making compromises without consulting his wife. Yejide tries her best to be a compliant wife, despite the endless amount of heartache thrown her way. The gulf between them is widened further because of societal expectations and the desperation to meet those ideals. Shame is a powerful emotion. The shame of not being “woman enough” or “man enough” can drive people to great lengths to hide their supposed deficiencies. Yejide has little support. As a woman, she must endure the community’s blame for anything that’s lacking in her marriage. She also receives indifferent reactions to her very valid emotions, which cause her lose grip on reality and retreat further within herself.

“This is a transition. A transition is a process. It is not a one-off event. There is no need for us to be cynical. There have been setbacks, but I think they are quite understandable. … It is a gradual transition, step by step, my dear. That is the only way to ensure lasting change.”

The drama occurs on both a personal and political scale. During the same time period as Yejide and Akin’s marital strife, Nigeria is undergoing major turmoil. After the 1985 coup, there’s a series of escalating conflicts where nothing really changes except a slow weakening of the country’s stability. The political battles and the characters’ reactions to the events mirror what’s going on in the marriage. Yejide describes family members knocking at her door as soldiers prepared for war because she knows they are going to inflict damage on her marriage. The introduction of the second wife occurs around the same time as Babangida’s successful coup. As Babangida assumes power, Yejide reflects that “Nigeria was still in the honeymoon phase of her relationship with Babangida, and like most new brides she wasn’t asking probing questions, yet.” The violence escalates, but no one is able to see how bad it’s gotten because they are too close to the situation. Even with deteriorating conditions, Yejide hopes that Babangida will maintain power “because the status quo was the devil we knew.” When someone questions the government’s commitment to change, Akin dismisses the idea that they would invest so many resources on something only to abandon their plans.

“She has tried hard-o, even a blind person can see how hard she has tried. But only a few people can win in a fight against their destiny. I have lived long enough to know that.”

Akin thought that as long as he and Yejide had a child they would find true happiness, no matter what had to be sacrificed to achieve that goal. But how many lies and secrets can a marriage endure? Lies pile on top of even more lies until it becomes too much for anyone to bear. Yejide marvels at how one doesn’t need to be lied to by another person in order to be deceived, because “the biggest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves.” It’s easy to blind ourselves to reality and fool ourselves into seeing what we want to see. As Yejide says, “sometimes faith is easier than doubt.” Love is complicated. Sometimes problems are too big to overcome and love just isn’t enough. Did Akin and Yejide ever have a chance at happiness or were they doomed from the beginning? Did the constant pressure to measure up to society’s ideals make honesty and open communication not seem like a valid option and prevent this couple from forging their own path? I thought this story was going to focus on the dynamics of a polygamous marriage, but it was so much more than that. Stay with Me is an amazing debut from a talented new author!

With one wave of a hand, everything changes.

Meg is picking up her daughter Audrey from school, just like any other weekday afternoon. She sees her daughter’s friend Jack waiting to cross the road, so she stops and signals to him that it’s okay to cross. As the teen makes his way to the next curb, he is struck by an inattentive driver in the next lane. Meg knows that the teen would be okay if she hadn’t allowed him to cross in front of her. Consumed by guilt, she dedicates herself to helping Jack’s family at the expense of her own family.

Maybe we’re not the different after all, the two of us—I understand the need to keep a handle on things, to exude the image you desperately want people to see because the real one is scary and unpredictable and might take over if you give it a chance.

Meg’s life begins to fall apart. She can barely keep it together and makes huge mistakes in both her personal and professional life. After years of putting up a perfect front, she begins questioning her parenting skills and her marriage. She and her husband can’t seem to get on the same page and her well-behaved teenage daughter becomes moody and secretive. To make matters worse, Jack’s accident brings up unresolved guilt about an accident she was involved in when she was sixteen-years-old.

“If you can’t trust the ones you love, life will always feel harder than it needs to be.”

I didn’t feel Meg’s guilt as strongly as I felt her personal struggles. My favorite parts were the minor interactions between family members. I even liked the teenager in this book! Meg sees Audrey repeating her past mistakes and there’s a point when Meg realizes that her parents encountered many of the same problems that she’s going through. There’s so much she doesn’t know, but she doesn’t have to be alone in her struggles. I loved this sweet moment when she reaches out to her father:

“When does it get easier?”
“Being a parent, you mean?”
I nod and Dad laughs. “It never gets easier. Just gets less hard.”
I scowl. “Isn’t that the same thing?”
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“I hope we all make it until then,” I say, giving him a wry smile. He bends down to kiss my cheek, and then we go back to the washing and drying, other of us silent with our own thoughts.

This was the first book I read after a long reading drought in the spring and it was exactly the type of book I needed: linear narrative, single character POV, and relatable drama/family dynamics. The thing that made me a little less enthusiastic about it is that Meg is very clear about what she’s feeling and she psychoanalyzes herself. There wasn’t much that I had to figure out for myself. To be fair, that was also what made it a good book for breaking a reading rut! I also felt like the story was happening before my eyes, so it was jarring when Meg referenced her future feelings. But overall, it was a solid story and the characters felt like real people. I liked how the author gave me just enough of an ending to satisfy me, but not so much of one that it felt too tidy. There was something comforting about this author’s style, so I’d be eager to read another one of her books.

“Fixing this is going to be twice as hard as breaking it, but this is as good a place as any to start.”

Despite our best intentions, sometimes we make mistakes. Those mistakes can result in terrible consequences. Sometimes we can never fix what we broke. Being thrown into unfamiliar territory builds new understandings between the characters. Meg learns that we’re all fighting the same battle. She sees firsthand how grief and guilt can cloud judgment and prevent a person from seeing past the present moment. In order to heal, she has to realize that it’s okay to forgive herself and others. She may have to learn to live with the “low hum of guilt,” but it doesn’t have to consume her.

 

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A relevant quote from the movie version of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls: “Most of us just get messily ever after… and that’s all right.”

Without bees, the flowers were just flowers, not blueberries, not bread and butter.

The three protagonists are multiple generations apart, but their lives are all linked by the fate of bees:

• Sichuan, China in 2098: Pollinating insects completely disappeared from Earth over half a century before, so humans have assumed the bees’ job. In order to survive, humans have refined the arduous process of hand-pollination. Children’s are trained for the job as soon as they enter school and they begin working when they turn eight-years-old. Like any parent, Tao wants her three-year-old son Wei-Wen to have more opportunities than she did. She spends her little time off teaching him, so that he can attend a special leadership-training school and avoid a lifetime of back-breaking labor. When Wei-Wen mysteriously collapses and is taken away by the authorities, everything changes. She blames herself because she thinks it’s her dreams for him that put him in a bad situation. She is willing to sacrifice everything to find her son.

• Hertfordshire, England in 1851: William is a biologist whose academic specialty is superorganisms. Superorganisms are individual insects that function together as a single organism; they need each other in order to survive as a whole. William sank into a deep depression after his mentor belittled him for sacrificing his life’s work to have a large family. When his passion reignites, he becomes obsessed with building the perfect beehive, one that will benefit both the beekeepers and the bees. He wants his son Edmund to continue his research, but Edmund is disinterested in his father’s attempts to lure him into the family business. William’s obsession with making his son carry on his legacy prevents him from seeing the true heir to his research.

• Ohio, USA in 2007: George descends from a long line of beekeepers. He devotes his entire life to his bee farm and ensuring his bees are thriving. He wants his son to take over the farm, but his son is more interested in his college studies and cultivating his writing career. The stress of bee farming increases when bee colonies begin disappearing in the southern USA. While his bees are doing fine so far, the future of his farm becomes uncertain.

She read about knowledge. About acting against one’s instincts, because one knows better, about how in order to live in nature, with nature, we must detach ourselves from the nature in ourselves. And about the value of education. Because this was what education was actually about, defying the nature in oneself.

The History of Bees is about letting go and resisting the impulse to exert control over everything. Every parent and mentor in this book has a fixed vision for their child’s or apprentice’s future. There seems to be the expectation that the next generation “justify [their] position on this earth.” Trying to tame the natural order has disastrous consequences. Each character has a firm idea of their child’s place in the universe and the means through which that place will be achieved, but it’s not until they relax their control that they are able to gain clarity. One major lesson is that one doesn’t have to choose between life and passion. Sometimes that passion is our contribution to our families and the future.

A single person’s life, a single person’s flesh, blood, body fluids, nerve signals, thoughts, fears and dreams meant nothing. My dreams for [my son] didn’t mean anything, either, if I failed to put them into a context and see that the same dreams had to apply to all of us.

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“And having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” What did that mean? That he who is captive is perhaps the only one who is truly free? Doing the right thing can be a prison, a form of captivity, but we had been shown the way. Why didn’t we manage it, then? Not even in meeting with His creation did human beings succeed in doing the right thing.*

This book was originally published in Norwegian, but I read the English translation. I chose this book because I love dystopian fiction and the “in the spirit of Station Eleven and Never Let Me Go” blurb called my name. I can see the Station Eleven comparison more clearly than Never Let Me Go. The thing that draws me to Kazuo Ishiguro’s work is the haunting, melancholic atmosphere and I just didn’t get that from this book.

I debated on whether to round my star rating up on down. I decided to round up because somehow it managed to worm its way into my heart! The downsides of this book were the pacing and some of the characterization. It was slow paced at times, so my interest waxed and waned. It occasionally comes across as a “message” book, but it’s not overly heavy-handed. It almost had a YA feel to it—especially George’s chapters—even though there are no young adult main characters. (I found out after writing this review that this is the author’s first novel for adults.) Tao was my favorite of the three perspectives. She felt the most human, while William and George felt like characters. Even though the male characters didn’t feel as authentic to me, they still had interesting stories. William is strange and insufferable, but his passion for the natural world is contagious. Some of my favorite chapters were actually in his sections, when he talks about the lifecycle of bees (at the 45% & 87% mark of my copy). George is old-fashioned and set in his ways. He’s never able to say the right thing. His folksy simplicity didn’t always ring true to me, but I could understand the dreams and fears that motivated his actions and resentments.

Alone she’s nothing, a part so tiny that it’s insignificant, but with the others she’s everything. Because together they’re the hive.

In The History of Bees, the author draws “connections between the small and the large, between the power of creation and creation itself.” Every living thing in this book is “fighting the ordinary, daily struggle” for their descendants and survival. The three protagonists are decades, sometimes centuries, apart. They don’t know each other and they may not live to realize how essential their contributions were, but together they make a huge impact on mankind’s fate. The characters’ lives and the lives of their offspring didn’t go as planned, but their creative solutions influence humanity’s future path. This book gave me a larger appreciation for all those who’ve come before us and made an impact on our lives, even if they would never get a chance to benefit from it.

OTHER
* My biblical knowledge is lacking, so I wanted some more context with this quote. This sermon helped me out: Slaves of Righteousness, Romans 6:19-23. It also has some analysis of 1984 and Brave New World, which was interesting!
* A reassuring article to read after reading this book: Bees Are Bouncing Back From Colony Collapse Disorder.

Three astronauts embark on a seventeen-month training simulation in preparation for a real trip to Mars. During the hyper-realistic simulation, Prime Space will be studying the astronauts’ behavior and monitoring their communications with their families to see how they hold up on such a long mission. The goal is “not asking them to deal with the environment [Prime Space has] created for them, but creating the right environment for them to deal with whatever they encounter.” The most unexamined territory is not within the simulation but within themselves. The Wanderers is a character-driven novel that explores the nature of humanity and our relationships with each other.

You don’t stop being a real person just because you aren’t in a real place.

I was eager to read this book because it was described as “The Martian meets Station Eleven.” That’s not really what it is (and I don’t think they’re making that comparison anymore), but I was lucky that it ended up being another type of book that I like: introspection in space (in a way)! Like much literary fiction set in space, most of the book actually takes place in the characters’ heads. It’s more like Good Morning, Midnight or Spaceman of Bohemia, because it’s a journey of self-discovery rather than a grand space adventure. It might be telling that it sometimes reminded me more of my nonfiction reading: Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe* and The Traveler’s Guide to Space: For One-Way Settlers and Round-Trip Tourists. Another reason I was interested in this book was because I’m always fascinated by the experiences of participants in real-life Mars simulations. It definitely satisfied me on that account! The author was inspired by the Mars 500 mission in Moscow. There’s also the HI-SEAS project in Hawaii; the fourth crew disembarked in August 2016 and the fifth crew’s mission should be ending soon.

“Who are these people that can withstand such a trip, the danger, the risk, the isolation, the pressure? What can these people teach us? Because if we— the species—might eventually do something like move to another planet, it would be better if we made a few improvements on ourselves first, if possible.”

The chapters alternate between seven characters. The three astronauts chosen for the mission were selected to perfectly complement each other, “a kind of dream team, a trio whose individual temperaments, skills, and experience would combine in such a way as to be able to withstand the most challenging and dangerous expedition in the history of humankind.” The astronauts are never content to stand still and are always wanting to push the limits of exploration. They love their families, but they can’t resist the call to the unknown.

The Astronauts
• Helen (53yo, USA) is experienced, tenacious, and reserved. She’s driven by a fear of being left behind. The end of her career coming up, but she isn’t ready to hang up her helmet just yet: “She is too young to watch herself be surpassed, and too old to be this hungry. She thinks she is too young to give up her dreams, and too old to want them this much. But she is both too young and too old, possibly, to change herself. And how many years left on Earth?” One of the most tragic things about Helen is that another person decided how her daughter would see her. Eventually, it would become how she saw herself.
• Sergei (45yo, Russia) is straightforward and pessimistic, with some anti-social tendencies. He presents himself like the man he wishes he was and is motivated by the urge to prove his father wrong.
• Yoshi (37yo, Japan) is thoughtful, professional, and likable. He’s the most adaptable and easygoing of the group, but he’s also prone to bouts of melancholy.

Intense focus on what was happening in the present eclipsed all else, but things do not disappear during an eclipse, only disappear from view.

The effects of isolation and confinement on the astronauts is what I came for, but it was their relationships with their families that ended up being the most intriguing. The Prime team is aware that the astronauts are very careful about how they present themselves, so they believe the family members might provide them with better insight. Yoshi’s wife Madoka observes that the tightly controlled conditions of the simulation are actually less extreme than everyday life on Earth. The astronauts have each other, but the family members are all dealing with some form of isolation as they deal with being left behind.

Prime Space team & the Families:
• Luke is a member of the observation team. The “Obbers” monitor the astronauts for signs of psychological distress.
• Mireille is Helen’s daughter. She’s vulnerable and emotional, which she channels into her acting. Her whole life has been overshadowed by her mother’s career. She resents mother for repeatedly putting her career first. She doesn’t want her mother’s story to define her life and she wishes that she didn’t need to be loved so much. Her nickname is Meeps, which made me feel irrationally irritated!
• Madoka is Yoshi’s eccentric wife and a sales operative for a company that manufactures robotic caregivers. Over the years, she has become a “kind of ancillary tool to the Voyages of Yoshi.” Her marriage to Yoshi looks strong to the outside world, but it’s actually hollow at the core. She’s relieved when he goes away for long periods of time because it’s exhausting to keep up the pretense of being Yoshi’s “awesome” wife.
• Dimitri is Sergei’s sixteen-year-old son. He feels inadequate next to his father and brother. He’s gay but isn’t ready to admit it to himself or anyone else.
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There’s so much value in getting the family members’ perspectives, but there was too much activity on Earth. Madoka’s story is the most refined, so she was my favorite. One thing I really liked about the astronaut chapters was their interactions with each other. The family members operated more like independent satellites. I know that’s the point, but it made those chapters less interesting for me. My favorite section involving the families was the prelaunch dinner when Madoka and Mireille both engaged in a bit of play acting.

“Why shouldn’t we feel awe? In front of a beautiful painting we do not ask ourselves is it real? We know that it is not real. It is a painting. But we can still be filled with awe at its beauty.”

My reading experience mirrored some of the characters’ experiences. This book really messed with my own sense of a reality! I felt awed by the enormity of space when I read Good, Morning Midnight, even though it was fiction. The characters were actually experiencing outer space, so I felt like I was too. The characters in The Wanderers were in a simulation, so that altered my experience. BUT THEN, paranoia sets in. One of the astronauts sees a glitch that makes them suspect they might actually be in space. With a real launch and a simulated launch occuring at the same time it was always a possibility, but that was the first real clue that something shady might be going on. A switch flipped in me; should I have been reading it differently the whole time? The glitch isn’t the point; it’s how the astronauts, and perhaps the reader, react to it.

To orbit the earth is not to be shot up to some magical zone where there is no gravity, but to be shot up in such a trajectory that your subsequent fall means you won’t hit anything; you will persistently and permanently miss the Earth and circle around it. To have done this is to understand the persistence and permanence of falling and to understand that what is true does not always feel like what is true.

The word planet comes from the ancient Greek word for wanderer. The planets “move in relation to each other and the stars, but they don’t wander all over.” You can’t see all of a planet or moon at once, and in some cases, you’ll never see all their faces. Similarly, the characters are only partially visible to each other. Everyone in this book is putting up a facade, concealing parts of themselves from each other, and even from themselves. Being the person they think they’re supposed to be prevents their relationships from being as fulfilling as they could be. The avoidance of feeling or causing pain puts a wall between these characters.

Yoshi will not just be pretending that he is going to Mars, he will be pretending to be the most perfect person to go to Mars, and maybe he is, almost without question, he is, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have to pretend to be what he really is, because aren’t we all pretending to be who we really are?

To some extent, all of these characters live in self-created artificial environments. So between the simulation and the characters’ facades, what’s real? It’s complicated! I’m reminded of Madoka reflecting on the contradictions in her marriage. She acknowledges that the outside perception of her marriage as solid has some truth to it, but the hollow reality of her marriage is also true. At one point, Helen becomes so used to her altered self in the outside simulations that her real self looks fake. Some of the characters realize that they’ve spent much of their lives reacting to situations that they’ve dreamed up; both Yoshi and Mireille mention being affected by conversations and situations that only occurred in their heads. Regardless of what’s actually happened, all the emotions and reactions awakened by their experiences are very real. On a personal level, the events of this book reminded me of dreams. Every once in a while, I’ll wake up irritated with my husband because of something he did in my dream. It’s completely irrational, but it felt so real at the time! And like Mireille, I’ve sometimes worked myself up over an argument that I’ve acted out in my head.

[Letter from Yoshi to Madoka] Pluto and Charon show each other only one face, never turning away. … In astronomy, we use the word barycenter to describe the center of mass between two orbiting objects. Our Luna is smaller than Earth, and so the barycenter of Earth and Luna is on Earth, deep within it, actually. Because Charon is so large, and its gravitational influence so great, the barycenter of Pluto and Charon lies outside Pluto. Strictly speaking, Charon does not orbit Pluto, nor Pluto, Charon. They rotate around a barycenter between them. Looking only at one piece of each other. …. I have come to believe that I have loved you incorrectly. I have been orbiting a dream I cannot touch. I only know one of your faces. It is not that I didn’t want to know another face, it is that I loved that one so powerfully. Maybe I did not wish to know. There is a possibility that you are like Luna, and you see all my faces while I see only one of yours. But, forgive me, I do not think this is true. I think we are mutually locked. Perhaps this is what it means to be married. Perhaps this is what it means to be married to me. I saw a little of you, and thought it was everything. I understand that I was wrong.

You don’t have to travel to space to experience the unknown. In their isolation, these characters are forced to confront long-buried demons. They can no longer avoid seeing the obvious in order to protect themselves. Helen insists on not changing or feeling too much on the simulation so that she can feel or change more during the real trip to Mars, but the change is unavoidable. As much as they fight it, they’ll all be irrevocably altered by their experience. The Wanderers is a quiet novel without much of a plot, but it provides many thought-provoking ideas to explore.

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OTHER:
* “For a mistake that measured 1/50th the width of a human hair, a two billion-dollar telescope was almost lost.” – More details about this incident is available here (#4 on the list). Mike Massimino talks about another incident with the Hubble Telescope in his book Spaceman, which is one of my favorite memoirs ever. His thoughts during the stressful situation made me laugh, even though I know it wasn’t very funny at the time: “This would be my legacy. My children and grandchildren would read in their classrooms: We might have known if there was life on other planets, but Gabby and Daniel’s dad broke the Hubble.”
* The Madoka/robotic caretaker sections reminded me of two excellent short stories I read recently. They are both available online: Tongtong’s Summer by Xia Jia (included in Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation compiled by Ken Liu) and Saying Goodbye to Yang (included in Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein)
* Speaking of eclipses, the total solar eclipse is coming up on August 21, 2017! We’re only getting the 67% version here in Houston. 🙁

“I promise I’ll never leave you.”

Deming Guo/Daniel Wilkinson has never had much stability in his life. He was born in New York to an undocumented Chinese immigrant, but was sent to live with family in China when he was only one year old. He was sent back to New York to live with his mother when he turned six. Five years later, his mother disappears without a trace. Peilan/Polly Guo left for work one morning and never returned. At the age of eleven, the people he thought were his family place him in the foster care system. He’s adopted by a white family in a suburban community.

You could play it one way and play it another, the same note sounding different depending on how you decided to hear it. You could try to do all the right things and still feel wrong inside.

Deming’s feelings towards his adoptive parents are complicated. He desperately wants their approval, but he’s never sure what they want from him. They mean well and give him a comfortable life, but they’re out of touch. They insist on complete assimilation, even going as far as changing his name to Daniel. Occasionally they try to incorporate their own conception of Chinese culture into his life, but they don’t ask for his input and there’s no consideration of how varied cultures can be in such a large country. They aren’t sensitive to his unique circumstances and develop a “colorblind” approach to parenting him. When he overhears a racist comment, his adoptive mother panics and insists that he misheard. She often seems to view life in China as inferior to life in the United States. She doesn’t realize her view of China may be biased, that her life isn’t the only type of life worth living, or even that her suburban community insulates her from some of the United States’s own problems.

It was a funny thing, forgiveness. You could spend years being angry with someone and then realize you no longer felt the same, that your usual mode of thinking had slipped away when you weren’t noticing.

With all that he’s been through in his twenty-one years, it’s no surprise that Deming/Daniel struggles with issues of identity and belonging. He blames himself for his mother’s disappearance. He feels unwanted and undeserving of love. A fear of letting people down forces him to keep people at an arm’s length. When he’s uprooted from Chinatown and placed in the predominately white and middle-class Ridgeborough, NY, he has to learn to navigate a completely different culture. He endures a constant onslaught of thoughtless comments and is exhausted by being both invisible and conspicuous at the same time. All throughout the book, he’s forced to compartmentalize his feelings and be careful about what he reveals to each person in his life. He can’t even completely relax with his closest friends: “Be careful. They’re not on your side. It’s important to be strong.” He tries so hard to fit in, to the point of losing himself altogether: “Daniel was malleable, everyone and no one, a collector of moods, a careful observer of the right thing to say.” The issues that Deming struggles with from having few family connections and a complicated parent really resonated with me. One of the most heartbreaking moments was when he felt embarrassment at referring to his mother as “Mama,” because “it felt like he was claiming something that didn’t belong to him.”

Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days.

I was really interested in Daniel’s perspective on life, but his chapters felt uneven. He had so much going on in his life, and his musical obsession and gambling problem were a little boring for me. Peilan’s chapters took the book to the next level. Peilan has never been content to stand still and lives for the excitement of new beginnings. She writes about growing up in China, the series of events that brought her to the United States, and the struggles of starting over in a place far away from everything she’d ever known. She immigrated to the United States in hopes of a better life and financial success, but moving up the economic ladder is almost impossible between low-wage jobs, unexpected expenses, and mounting debt. Despite the new location, she finds herself encountering similar roadblocks as she did in China. She manages to build her own little family in the New York, but she feels isolated when her son speaks in rapid English that she can’t understand or she hears her boyfriend exchanging family stories with his sister. She also feels suffocated by motherhood and the heavy responsibility of guiding her son in the right direction.
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Daniel preferred disorder to order, liked the trees in the spaces between buildings, leaves touching the low roofs of older homes. The city looked like it was trying to build itself up but would never fully succeed. This was an underdog’s city, ambitious and messily hungry, so haphazard it could collapse one night and be reassembled by the following morning.

When Deming remembers his short relationship with his mother, he remembers being “enough” and not having to try so hard to be accepted. Despite spending only five years together, there are many parallels to how Deming and Peilan experience the world. They find comfort in disorder, knowing “that nothing stayed the same for too long, that each day was a new opportunity for reinvention.” They both experience synesthesia. They imagine other versions of themselves leading different lives. They both feel their pasts and everyone who has touched their lives as a physical weight. Getting to know Deming and Peilan as individuals shows how family bonds go much deeper than the biological.

“We can’t make ourselves miserable because we think it’ll make them happy. That’s a screwed up way to live.”

There’s also the recurring theme of a parent’s expectations conflicting with their child’s needs and desires. There are both parents who see their child’s successes and deficiencies as a reflection of themselves and those who don’t expect anything from their children at all. In addition to the forced assimilation, Daniel’s parents dissuade him from being a musician. They want him to follow in their footsteps. Both his biological and adoptive mothers had parents who expected little of them because of their gender. They were both were determined to shatter those low expectations, but it was still a source of resentment. Will Daniel ever grow comfortable in his own skin and learn to live for himself?

Over the years, he had thought about what his life would have been like if Mama and Leon hadn’t left, if Vivian hadn’t taken him to the foster care agency. It was like watching water spread across dry pavement, lines going in all directions. …. But today he could only see himself where he was right now, the particular set of circumstances that had trickled down to this particular life, that would keep trickling in new directions. …. All this time, he’d been waiting for his real life to begin: Once he was accepted by Roland’s friends and the band made it big. Once he found his mother. Then, things would change. But his life had been happening all along.

Did Peilan leave Deming by choice or was she taken from him by force? The Leavers is a thought-proving story about belonging, identity, and what it means to be a family. These flawed characters make awful choices and even made me angry sometimes, but I could understand how they evolved into the people they were and how they were able to rationalize their choices. The characters fool themselves to protect a life they’ve grown accustomed to, but they can never completely escape what they’re running from, regardless of the distance they put between themselves and their problems.

The author Lisa Ko was inspired by a real-life story. Spoiler Alert: There are some parallels, so don’t read if you haven’t read the book!

Coroners deal with death, but their purpose is to find answers for the living.

Ken Holmes’s career at the Marin County coroner’s office spanned nearly forty years. He started out as a licensed embalmer at a funeral home, which led to him becoming a death investigator for the county. During the last twelve years of his career, he was the elected county coroner. In this book he reveals the intricacies of his job, a job that most people would rather not think about: the tell-tale signs our bodies leave behind, the collecting of evidence, the family notification process, differences between TV representations and real life, changes in technology over the years (fingerprint cartooning was a thing!), preparing the county for mass casualty events, running investigations in areas where people are hostile to law enforcement, working with press, and dealing with the politics. As an employee of the coroner’s office, Holmes had to be not only a detective and a doctor, but a “consoler, advocate, educator, mentor, teacher, and bureaucrat.”

One of the most surprising things I learned from this book is that there aren’t any national standards for coroners. In most states, it’s an elected position. Not all coroners are medical examiners and often they aren’t even required to have medical training. The author mentions that one Indiana county elected a high school senior as coroner! I also had to adjust the high-tech image in my head of what I thought a coroner’s office looked like. The Marin County coroner’s office doesn’t even have a lab or morgue on premises. Those services are contracted to outside facilities.

Marin County is an affluent area that’s home to one end of the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the world’s top suicide sites, and San Quentin Prison, location all of California’s 750 male death row inmates. Every year, approximately 300 of the 1,500-1,800 deaths in Marin County require autopsies. During his decades of experience, Holmes saw a wide variety of cases, both personally and through his colleagues’ work. This book highlights the most interesting and memorable cases in his career, as well as the lessons he learned along the way. There are quite a few out-of the-ordinary incidents: a serial killer haunting the trails, a small cult near Holmes’s home, celebrity victims and instigators, and the time Holmes became a witness to an active crime.

Real life truly is stranger than fiction! I would’ve found many of the cases unbelievable if Holmes hadn’t experienced them for himself. A large number of the victims he investigated died by their own hand; more than twice as many Americans die by suicide than by murder. Since these are real-life cases, they don’t all have neat and tidy endings. Some of the cases took decades to solve and many only reached conclusion by a series of unlikely coincidences. Thanks to Holmes’s impeccable record keeping skills and his dedication to following cases even after they left his hands, there’s closure to more cases than I expected.

There are so many fascinating cases in this book, but here are three that were extra memorable for me:
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• Two brothers thought a small town bank would be an easy target, but got more than they bargained for! The bank teller made four calls to handle the situation and only the last one was to the police department.

“The more time you spend around death, the more you appreciate life.”

Not every victim gets justice. Sometimes by the time the details of the case become clearer, there’s no way to prove their theories. Other times there are political concerns and budget constraints. The cops or district attorney may not want to deal with a case for various reasons, so the coroner’s office might receive pressure to rule a certain way. Most California counties have a combined sheriff’s/coroner’s office where the sheriff is the coroner. During Holmes’s tenure, the Marin County coroner’s office operated separately from the sheriff’s office. He outlines the benefits to having an independent coroner’s office. For instance, law enforcement has priorities that may come into conflict with the interests of the victims’ families. The time constraints of a combined office can lead to families never getting answers. In a couple of baffling cases, a person’s death was determined to be a suicide even though there were multiple clues that pointed to foul play.

“Every death has a story, just like every life. Coroners are privy to it in ways that other professions are not. That’s what draws people like me to it, the chance to be present, understand, and help others deal with something that usually is awful, at a time when people tend to feel most alone.”

The body’s process of shutting down may be gruesome, but it’s an inescapable part of our life cycle. This book was a real page-turner! It has a very small-town feel, both because of the time Holmes spends on each case, as well as his and the author’s personal connections to some of the victims. I side-eyed a few of the casual conclusions made based on appearances, but for the most part, this book is a fascinating look at a long and varied career. In the conclusion, Holmes talks about how his views on suicide victims, the good guy/bad guy dichotomy, and the justice system have evolved with his years of experience. I admired Holmes’s dedication to the victims’ families and the time and energy he devoted to their cases. His insistence on getting answers for the families made this book a compelling read.

The author John Bateson also wrote The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge.