The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee : Observations on Not Fitting In

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, a timely meditation on mixed race politics, identity, and interracial desire, poet Paisley Rekdal–daughter of a Chinese American mother and a Norwegian father–chronicles a soul-searching journey that takes her throughout Asia.

In her travels, she teaches English in South Korea where her native colleagues call her a “hermaphrodite,” and is dismissed by her host family in Japan as an American despite her assertion of being half-Chinese. A visit to Taipei with her mother, who doesn’t know the dialect, leads to the bitter realization that they are only tourists, which makes her further question her identity. Written with remarkable insight and clarity, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee lyrically demonstrates that the shifting frames of identity can be as tricky as they are exhilarating.

“Insightful and idiosyncratic…. Rekdal’s essays are so engaging that it takes while to realize how much they reveal about the delicate, shifting balance between the ways others perceive us and how we choose to define ourselves.”–Us Weekly

“An engaging and artful memoir…poetic not in its diction but in it elisions, in the spaces she allows between thoughts.”–The New York Times Book Review

“Makes us feel and see the complicated and violent nature of the issue of race and identity. Rekdal writes with eloquence, liveliness, and poignancy.”–Ha Jin, author of Waiting

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

In this collection, filled with vivid descriptions, Rekdal takes a journey through locales ranging from Beijing, China, to Natchez, Mississippi, and embarks on a personal and cultural exploration as well. The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Norwegian father, Rekdal wrestles with choosing which culture she relates to most powerfully, even telling her mother that she would rather be "full or nothing." In each essay, the author splices an often whimsical story—about, for example, her time spent teaching English at Usok Girls' High School in Chonju, South Korea, and her mission to find her great-aunt Opal's Chinese roots in Natchez—with difficult truths about ethnicity. Rekdal doesn't hold back: Her family and friends, her travels and her own shortcomings are scrutinized in the same piercing light. While she recognizes in the end that she cannot choose one identity without losing half of herself, even her painful discoveries are mitigated by the freshness and vitality of her voice. —E. Beth Thomas

Publishers Weekly

The final essay in this unfocused collection recounts Rekdal's search for evidence of a Chinese community that had settled in Natchez, Miss., in the early 1900s; her great-aunt was a member. At the visitor's center in Natchez, she is told there was no such community. The attendant explains, "There's just us. Just Natchez. Everyone--blacks, white, Chinese, we're all in here together." Rekdal, the daughter of a Chinese-American mother and an American father of "Norwegian stock," is attracted to the inclusiveness implied in the Natchezian's statement, but finds it difficult to believe. Traveling through America, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and China, she continually confronts the difficulty of negotiating her biracial identity and the hard truth that she "cannot choose one identity without losing half of [her]self." A poet (her first collection, A Crash of Rhinos, is forthcoming), Rekdal writes with a sure hand, though she stretches her broad subtitle to encompass travel sketches, childhood memories and meditations on sharks and BB guns. The essays are further diffused by her technique of continuously moving between past and present (her excursion to Taiwan, for example, serves almost entirely as backdrop for thoughts of her boyfriend in America). Perhaps the difficulty of Rekdal's position prevents her from seeing what could have been her focus. When trying to explain to the Japanese family she stays with that she is half-Chinese, she is sternly rebuked with "I am sorry, but you are American": what it means to be American is the insistent, unanswerable question that dogs Rekdal wherever she goes. Agent, Leigh Feldman, Darshanoff & Verrill Literary Agency. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

VOYA

Daughter of a Chinese mother and Norwegian father, Rekdal presents a series of vignettes about her life as a continuous outsider, covering her travels in Taiwan with her mother, her time as an exchange student in Japan, her teaching experience in Korea, and her life in the United States. She is set apart from the Taiwanese because she is of mixed race and does not speak Mandarin, from the Japanese and Koreans because she is American, and from the other exchange students and Americans because she is part Asian. This collection will fascinate mature readers with its literary style and thoughtful observations. It might be too literary, however, for many teenagers. They will be able to relate to feeling different but might begin to wonder just where Rekdal eventually fits in. Many vignettes involve cultural differences that might be of little interest or incomprehensible to most American teenagers. Will they really understand the problem with Rekdal's desire to take a holiday during vacation week from the school where she is teaching in Korea? Those not exposed to cultures beyond the American border probably will not. At the same time, many girls might shudder at the thought of discussing a live-in love with their mothers. Older or Asian readers, however, will enjoy her lyrical writing and her insightful comments and might relate to her experiences. VOYA CODES: 4Q 2P S A/YA (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; For the YA with a special interest in the subject; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12; Adult and Young Adult). 2000, Pantheon Books/Random House, 211p, Ages 16 to Adult. Reviewer: Kendall Diane Brothers SOURCE: VOYA, April 2001 (Vol. 24, No.1)

Library Journal

Born and reared in Seattle, Rekdal (poetry, Univ. of Wyoming, Laramie) is a hyphenated third-generation American of half Chinese, half Norwegian descent. In these essays, she ruminates on family history and ethnic identity. For instance, she relates that when she attempted to patch together her family's assimilation story as a child, her grandparents, mother, and aunt deliberately misinterpreted her questions or insinuated that such questions shouldn't be asked. At 20, she set out looking for answers. She visited Japan as an exchange student, taught English at a high school in Korea, and traced her great aunt's life in small-town Mississippi. When she and her mother traveled to China, they decided that now they can only be visitors. Unfortunately, there is a sameness to these essays, and potentially interesting questions never get asked, let alone answered, such as why her parents chose the name Paisley and how did she become a writer. Recommended for larger libraries and those serving Asian American communities. (Rekdal's A Crash of Rhinos, a collection of poetry, is scheduled to be published this year by the University of Georgia Press.)--Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Ann Marlowe - New York Times Book Review

[An] engaging and artful memoir of growing up half Chinese-American and half Norwegian-American...Her memoir is poetic not in its diction but in its elisions, in the spaces she allows between thoughts. Rekdal makes the reader work to understand her unusual sensibility, and she is aware that we may not always be able to make the leap. As she says: ''There are limits to what can be shared, I know. There are limits to what everyone can say.'' In the lovely title chapter she leaves us to draw the link between her mother's anger, as a teenager, at her poverty and Bruce Lee's practicing his kung fu skills. Thanks to her skill, we can. Read all 7 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Lisa See

Paisley Rekdal has taken that universal question–Who am I?–and added to it another dimension: What am I?–and added to it another dimension: What am I? She has looked in the mirror, as well as the world around her, to examine issues of identity, ethinicity, culture, and race. No polemics here, just observations and experiences of the most personal kind. And she's funny too! — author of On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family

Arthur Golden

She is the sort of observer we should all wish for: disarming, frank, and intelligent. In setting out to explore three realms–China, Japan, and Korea–she ends up learning much more about another one: herself. — author of Memoirs of a Geisha

Jin Ha