Written by: Tessa Hulls
First line: If you had told me five years ago that my mother and I would find ourselves here, traveling back into the past in the hopes of building a bridge between us, the sheer impossibility would have caught in my throat like a bone.
Why you should read this book: I notice that I read a lot of memoirs written by adult women about their complex relationships with their problematic mothers, but this one seems overwhelming in comparison, almost impossibly complex, and deep, and heart-wrenching. To understand her relationship with her mother, Tessa Hulls must understand who her mother is, and to understand that, she must understand her mother's trauma, and to do that, she must understand her grandmother, who she knew only as a small and crazy Chinese lady who lived in her house in California, physically, but mentally existed in some evanescent slice of world history involving the Communist Revolution. Now grown, her grandmother passed, Hulls takes her mother back to Hong Kong and China in an attempt to recreate the lives of her ancestors while recalling her own childhood and how her American upbringing made her a stranger to the past.
Why you shouldn't read this book: It's heavy; no wonder it took the author a decade to write.
