Despite it being the first day of summer for parents of school aged kids, our devoted book club members Anabela, Emilie, Claudia, and Evita joined me and Flor in Flor’s studio in Mile End.
Thank you for coming and taking time to pay attention to the heavy work of Lisa Ko, Lucila Quieto, and each other.
As people logged on, we began sharing what we assumed happened to Peilan when Deming was informed she disappeared. Some of us thought she died, some thought it was ICE, some thought she tried to start a new life in China. This was coupled with recounting the most intense scenes in the book. There were many. Some agreed that the most heartbreaking scene was Peilan’s transport and arrival in Ardsleyville, ICE’s detention centre, a place she stays for 14 months. The detailing of her deportation also broke our hearts. Anabela and Evita, detailed the culture of for-profit-detention centres for adults and children, and how difficult it is for us to truly comprehend its abilities to destroy communities and be such an enduring thread in American life.
We focused on Peilan’s looking for Deming, and Deming’s looking for himself.
Why and how did Peilan stop her search for Deming?
Ko gives us the 1st person narrative of Peilan answering the question only after the 3rd person narration of Deming, who receives the explanation piecemeal. As it is, we agreed, ultimately her story.
We discussed how broken Peilan must have been after 14 months abused in detention, with some of that time spent in solitary confinement, under lights that never turned off, trash for meals, and without any knowledge of what’s happening to her family. She is surprised when she ends up in Fuzhou after she is deported from the USA. She then takes a bus to her home village of Minjiang. She finds her old house and discovers that her baby daddy’s family moved into her dad’s house after he died. Her only option is to sell it to them. They rip her off on the deal, but it’s enough to try to start a new life. Peilan goes back to Fuzhou, which now, twenty years later, has an airport and a new economy.
How do you continue to be a mother, and someone responsible for another human when you have experienced such depravity?
“There wasn’t anything I could do,” I [Peilan] said. “I couldn’t go back to America after being deported. I couldn’t go anywhere. If I thought about you too much I wouldn’t be able to live.”
This was after she had already lived through earlier traumas: getting pregnant as a teen after her first time having sex, she tried to obtain abortions in several places in China, then escaped to New York with money from a loan shark, lived in squalor, worked every hour she could, and tried to get another abortion. We surmised, given her upbringing, she wasn’t clear on how abortions worked and by then it was too late. She managed to give birth to Deming and tried to raise him until it became unbearable to take care of him and herself and work fast enough in the factory to make enough money to repay the loan shark instalments. She sends Deming back to China to live with her dad, before getting him back again, only to then lose him again at 12, and for him to lose who he thinks he is supposed to be.
We talk about the fragility of teenagehood’s beginnings. And it is then, that Deming’s world is shattered when she “leaves.” He believes his mother abandoned him, a burden he carries until he’s in college, when, after hitting rock bottom, he goes to search for her.
He lands in Fuzhou:
It was trippy, surreal, the swirl of familiar sounds on such unfamiliar streets. He’d never been to Fuzhou before but it was a place he already knew.
Deming eventually gets his mother’s phone number, and in one of their many conversations, asks if she remembers what she said to him when he was six, after they saw their doppleganger family in NYC. She says a brisk, “No”. “I couldn’t remember; it was so long ago,” she narrates, and then her husband, Yong (who doesn’t know about Deming yet), comes home and Peilan has to end the call.
What Deming wants to remind her of is a broken promise.
“She promised she’d never leave him again on the day they found their doppelgängers. Back then, six-year-old Deming and his mother were still strangers to each other, but formed a satisfying pair.”
Emilie mentions that their conversations are stilted. Peilan is wary of revealing too much. When Deming questions her motivations and choices, we all agree that her assurance is a typical parental patronizing he resents: “But you were safe with the white family!” Maybe she really did believe this? Maybe him fostered and adopted by a middle-class white American couple is the story she has to tell herself to live with the impossible choices life presented her. Joan Didion reminds us, “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.”
We spoke a lot about the elaborate details of each place in the book and Ko’s robust research on China, ICE detention centres, the suburbs, and rooming houses in New York. These details, like the before and after of China’s rapid expansion, allowed the reader to be present in the environment of the characters.
We also discussed Ko’s ability to, without cliches, reveal Deming’s complicated and ardent relationship to music. Music was a huge role in his life, and his outlet for making sense of the world, and yet it also made him question that world and the people that made it, including himself.
We each gave examples of how Ko was able to create a world of characters that were genuine, contradictory, and believable. Claudia astutely pointed that she loved how the book made space for these characters and their actions, and that there was no clear cut ending. This resonated with all of us too. At the end, Deming doesn’t follow what Peilan, or Peter and Kay think he needs to do. He moves to Harlem, NYC, with Michael, his trusted friend, and person who has, in some ways, never made him feel inadequate.
“For now, this was where his life would be. This apartment with Michael. This city. His best home. The heater clanked, a siren ripped up the block. He placed the lid back on the rice cooker and took his bowl into the bedroom so he and Michael could eat together.”
Florencia walked us through and gave historical context to the evocative and chilling photo works of Argentine artist Lucila Quieto’s series Arqueologías de la Ausencia (Archaeology of Absence) (1999–2001).
Anabela started to cry discussing the intimacy of the layering of memories and familial bonds in the imagery. I did too. Maybe others did too? The unrequited longing that the children of the disappeared will forever face is ineffable.
I explained how in an arts & activism residency in Chiapas, Mexico we engaged with feminicide. Flor corrected me that it really isn’t comparable at all. The Argentine families were often killed because of their involvement with politics that were counter to the regime. They chose to stand up for their beliefs against fascism over their children. It is incomprehensible to consider how someone’s mother would choose something else over them. A mother is supposed to be the all-encompassing giver, that puts everyone, especially her children’s needs above her own.
Ko shows us that this reductive and oppressive narrative isn’t how it really is, nor how it should be.
The children of the disappeared are trying to make sense of who they are and who they can be without any parental road map or narrative to guide them along along a backdrop of violence. Posing in front of photos of their parents does this in an abstract way. They insert themselves (back) into a narrative that has never existed, to a narrative they are able to call their own. The group honed in on how this connected to Deming’s journey. Is his fascination with “the doppelganger family” his mother and him saw on the subway a kind of projection as well?
What makes us who we are?
There was much more. Please add info or correct any mistakes in the comments if you can.
As always, I am so grateful for the time we continue to make.
x
We will tentatively meet week of 23 or 24, or 30, or 31 of August to discuss Sorrowland. Please specify what works when you know, and email me if you need the e-pub.
Sorrowland (2021) by Rivers Solomon (368 pgs.)
Roxanne Gay gave this science fiction novel 5 stars on Goodreads and it’s won a a lot of awards.
“Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.
To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future—outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.”
I'm so grateful for this group! I got chills reading this summary and thinking of the photographs. Oh and I remembered specifically what made me burst into tears while reading the book: it was when they spoke on the phone for the first time after being apart and Deming said "Hello, Mama." Something about adult Deming calling her "mama" just broke my heart into pieces. It was the first thing my son called me (he now calls me Mom or Mommy) and it just feels so primal.