Last night my husband and I had some time in the evening, so we watched Somewhere Between, a documentary about teenagers adopted from China that he had downloaded some time before. I have known of this documentary for months—and had always planned to see it—but I just wasn’t in a real hurry. I think it was the title. Both the words “Somewhere” and “Between” communicate ambiguity, nebulousness, and just not exactly fitting in. I believe it is possible for our children adopted from China, to fit in, to know exactly where they belong, and to have a firmly implanted identity, and not be just stuck “somewhere between.”

CAUTION: SPOILER ALERT

But last night we watched it. And I was blown away. Just watching that first scene of the producer, Linda Goldstein Knowlton, adopting her own Chinese daughter brought everything back, and the tears started to roll. I had not expected to be emotionally taken in within the first three minutes of the film.

I knew this was a documentary involving discussions of several teenagers about what it felt like to be adopted from China. But I had no idea that the filming covered a three-year period, and that each of these girls had their own story that came to a climax within that time.

Fang, who was adopted from Kunming at age five and grew up in Berkeley, goes back to China often and speaks excellent Chinese. She has memories of her birth mother and is of the idea (which I agree with) that she comes from one of China’s ethnic minorities. In one of her trips she befriends a little girl in an orphanage with Cerebral Palsy, continues to visit her, and hopes this girl will one day have a family. Amazingly, an American family that already has one adopted child with CP decides that they want to adopt another. Fang ends up facilitating the adoption.

Haley, from Nashville, decides to search for her birth parents. Together with her parents, she goes to a village, hangs up a poster, and within about an hour, a man comes forward claiming to be her birth father. I could see immediately that his man knew in his heart that he had found his daughter. He held her, stroked her hair, talked lovingly to her, told her about the day he returned home to find that his wife had abandoned her.

But, DNA testing still needed to be done. “He’s not going to end up being her bio Dad,” Chris said. “There’s no way.” The documentary switched to other scenes, while we anxiously awaited the results. Finally, the camera brought us back to Haley, three months later, and back in China. The DNA was a match. We watched as her China father, China mother, three older sisters, and younger brother came to the hotel to see her. In the family pictures, Haley fits right in; she’s clearly a member of that family.

I would never have encouraged Grace to find her birthparents until watching this. Now, should she bring it up and want to do it, I will be behind her all the way. Regardless of the remote possibility that we ever find her birth family, Haley’s story showed me that there is another side to adoption. Our side is the visible side. Behind it is that which is invisible: a family in crisis, a family with loss, a family who has not forgotten, and likely never will. Haley finding her birth parents wasn’t just about Haley; it brought healing to this Chinese family who was in a tough spot and have paid for it ever since. And especially to her China dad, whose face, unlike most Chinese, was an open window into deep emotion and hurt. At the end, I think I was happier for him than I was for Haley.

Jenna is driven and purposeful. She excels in everything. She goes to Spain to speak at an adoption conference and breaks down when she has to describe how it feels to be abandoned. She said something along the lines of: “Even if I believe 99% that I was placed, or given, that remaining 1% that tells me I’m abandoned, I can’t forget.” It isn’t often that we can touch that deepest place and then actually articulate what we feel such eloquence. But Jenna paid a price. The next moment her face was distorted in by a silent sob, the one kind you want to blink back, but the kind you cannot control. Later, she said that perhaps her drive and desire to succeed came from needing to prove that she did not deserve to be abandoned.

I’ve never accepted this word “abandoned” and her story makes me despise it even more. Abandoned is a callous word. In fact, as Haley’s story showed us, there is a deep story of turmoil, despair, and love that is behind every child who is supposedly “abandoned.”

Somewhere Between is so much more than a documentary. It is an intertwining of memoir in film. Highly recommended.

A few weeks ago Grace took a shower.

As it’s winter and the air is dry, she asked if she could put on some lotion. I told her she could.

A few minutes later I went to check on her. “Look Mom,” she said, pointing to her belly where she had rubbed the lotion, “my skin is whiter now.”

I looked dubiously at her belly. “If you say so,” I said. “But, why do you want your skin to look whiter?”

“Because white is better,” she said.

My eyes nearly popping, I stepped into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet, taking the still towel-clad Grace with me.

“Who told you this?” I demanded, grasping her shoulders.

“My classmates,” she said.

“But they are wrong,” I said, “White is not better.”

She didn’t believe me. “White is better. White like you.”

“Grace, don’t you know that I always stick my face in the sun so I can turn brown like you?! I love your lovely golden brown skin. It’s how God made you. It’s perfect.”

“It’s not as good as white,” she answered.

I decided to let the conversation drop at that point. I was not sure that belaboring the point would make it any better.

The next day I had lunch with one of my former students, Lily, a doctoral student in Chinese calligraphy.

I told Lily about my conversation with Grace. She was not a bit surprised.

“Of course,” she said. “Grace’s classmates are just repeating what their mothers have told them. We have one standard for beauty in China: eyes should be large, body should be thin, mouth should be small, and most importantly, skin should be white.”

“It’s the same with calligraphy,” she said. “We’ve always simply copied the master, and in this way, we have followed the standard. And in China, to follow the standard is the highest compliment.”

I had to acknowledge that that has been my experience in China as well. The highest compliment that someone can pay me is to state that my spoken Mandarin is biaozhun, that is, “standard.”

I wondered how I was going to handle this parenting dilemma. Here I had always worried about how Grace would feel fitting in as an Asian in the United States. Yet here she was, in an all-Chinese classroom, being told she was not “standard.” I had not anticipated this, and had no idea how to handle it. How could I, her white mother, convince her that white was not better?

Lily continued discussing calligraphy. “But to truly be a great calligrapher, you have to break every rule. You have to take every standard and make your own new standard. You cannot be a great calligrapher unless you do this.”

Grace and I haven’t discussed “whiteness” again; I’m not going to bring it up until she does. But thankfully, I no longer feel lost in a parenting conundrum. Rather, I am going to tell her about my student Lily. And I’m going to tell her about the Great Calligrapher, the One who breaks every standard and in so doing, creates the ultimate beauty that is so much more than just a copy, creating each of us unique and special and beautiful.

Here’s one in honor of National Adoption Month:

I believe joy springs from loss.

I don’t mean consolation-prize joy or let’s-look-on-the-bright-side joy. I mean genuine joy that springs from the same and very soil our losses are buried in; authentic joy that simply would not have happened if loss had not happened first.

And adoption might be the clearest and best example, for every adoption must begin with profound loss: the loss of the life one would have had.

It was this loss I was mourning when we moved to China six years ago. Three years before, my husband Chris and I had traveled to one of China’s poorer provinces to adopt a beautiful baby girl. We named her Grace Amelie—her middle name French like her older sister’s, her given name Grace because she was a heaven-sent gift. But as we were finishing up the paperwork and preparing to fly home, something had begun to nag at me.

It had started at the hotel, when we took off her layers of clothes and the rag that served as a diaper, and replaced them with the cutest outfit we had brought with us and a fresh disposable diaper. For I knew I was changing her. And I was changing her yet again when I gave her her first bath, put her in a high chair, and babbled to her in English. It had nagged at me when we boarded the airplane, landed her on U.S. soil, and happily told her she was now an American. For even though we were giving her a family and a place to belong, I knew I was changing her identity. And she was losing something.

Yes, I had come to China, in part, looking for the life my daughter had lost.

What I found, now six years later (and counting), is that I can never give her back the Chinese life that she lost. But every joy she has experienced since—and there have been many—all have their roots in that first loss. Not only that, our family has undergone a subtle, yet significant shift in identity. Grace’s Chinese culture has washed over our all of us. The Chinese family she lost has become the Chinese-American family she gained.

This country of Grace’s original loss has tied our family together with experiences we never would otherwise have shared. We have made and eaten dumplings with Chinese villagers. We have marveled at the beauty and history found in each Chinese character. We have taught hundreds of fresh-faced Chinese university students. And we had the chance to go back to Grace’s home province, and thank the foster family that cared for her so lovingly and so well, knowing they would inevitably lose her.

In fact, the ground of Grace’s loss is so overgrown with bounty and abundance and hope, I cannot see the loss but for the joy.

I read in China Daily yesterday that the Chinese write Mo Yan had won the Nobel Prize for literature. I was pleased. The Chinese have a lengthy artistic and literary tradition that we in the West have been slow to appreciate. And the Chinese long for world approval by Olympic committees and Nobel committees and such. I was happy for them.

I first came across Mo Yan a few years ago while we were still living in Shandong province. He is from the countryside of Shandong—just like most of our students at that time—and has used this locality as a backdrop for nearly every novel. At that time, 2009, Mo Yan had just published Frog—a novel inspired by his aunt who was a midwife. Since I was curious about the impact of the one-child policy in the towns and villages of Shandong province, I wanted to get a Chinese writer’s fictional take on this controversial topic.

I bought Frog at the local Xinhua bookstore in Chinese (it has, to my knowledge, yet to be translated into English). For several weeks my Chinese teacher and I read through it. I was taken in by the story, but ultimately, I felt my Chinese level just wasn’t good enough yet to tackle a modern novel, even with my teacher’s help.

This afternoon I saw that press coverage of Mo Yan’s award is mixed. Although his works have been banned in the past, dissidents say he is now too close to the government. Essentially, Mo Yan is discredited for being a politically acceptable choice. I’m disappointed. Must every Chinese be a full-fledged dissident to meet with our sanctimonious approval? Cannot a Shandong peasant-turned-writer living within the political reality of what it means to be Chinese today write valid prose?

This morning I retrieved my copy of Frog from the bookshelf and took it with me to class. My students—all first-year PhD candidates—had heard the news. But they didn’t seem that moved. When I asked for a show of hands as to who had read one of Mo Yan’s novels, only one student raised his hand. And he admitted that he had not finished the one book he started. Hopefully with the Nobel now in hand, more Chinese, and more Westerners, will read the works of Mo Yan.

I know I haven’t been blogging lately. I’ve been at the dentist. Three kids and unfortunately, each with more than one cavity, means several visits to our local dental association. So I’m posting an email I sent out to friends and family last year on the occasion of our first visit…

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It’s difficult living in China sometimes.

It’s cold outside, but the radiators that heat our building (and those throughout the rest of the country north of the Yangtze River where they have heat) won’t be turned on until November 15, so a constant chill accompanies us everywhere.

Our apartment has a limited flow of electricity, meaning that if I try to boil water and use the toaster oven at the same time, we lose all power for a few minutes.

Internet service is capricious.

To go anywhere we have to stand on crowded buses that lurch ever so slowly through congested traffic.

And then there are those events and chores that would be such small matters were we in the U.S., but such big matters living in another culture.

Like a cavity.

When I went to pick the kids up from school on Monday Grace walked out with a painful grimace and glossy eyes.

“My tooth hurts,” she said.

I checked her mouth and indeed saw a dark spot on the tooth to which she was pointing.

I sighed. It was late afternoon on Monday, and Chris and I had to teach all day on Tuesday. There was no free time in our schedule to take care of Grace’s tooth until Wednesday, and she couldn’t wait that long. Her tooth needed to be fixed now.

“Why did this have to happen on Monday?” I thought to myself.

I looked around at some of the other moms at the school and asked if there were a dentist nearby.

They pointed in vague directions, and mentioned certain bus numbers and bus stops. Problem was, it was nearing 5 pm; rush hour was upon us and I was worried the dentists would soon close. Plus, I still needed to get Katherine and Andrew home.

I told the kids to put on their backpacks and we got on the #26 bus to the west gate of our university’s campus. I called Chris and told him Katherine and Andrew would be walking home from the gate, and to watch for them.

I remembered that when we first moved here I had seen a sign for a dentist, and had made a mental note. Katherine had two cavities in Tai’an, so my dental Chinese was actually pretty decent. Grace and I crossed the street. We saw the sign, which pointed down the street.

We walked a block and found a medical clinic. I stopped to ask about the dentist. She gave me explicit directions for a “very famous” clinic several bus stops away. Grace and I walked to the bus stop, both of us feeling the enormous weight of this task.

I then looked over my shoulder one last time. A few buildings over from the medical clinic, I saw an English sign that read “Dental Association.”

“Let’s give it a try,” I told Grace.

As we approached it looked dark, but the doors opened and two cheerful nurses stood behind the reception desk. I pointed to Grace and said her tooth hurt.

The nurses ushered us immediately into a dental examination room, where the dentist and dental assistant appeared as though they had been just waiting for us to arrive. The dentist had a calm manner, explaining everything to Grace and me in Chinese… “it’s a deep cavity…I’m going to have to drill…it won’t hurt.”

Grace closed her eyes and squeezed out two big tears.

“You can do it Grace!” I said. “You are so brave. I know you can do it. We’re already here, and we need to fix your tooth so it won’t hurt.”

The assistant gave her a tissue; she wiped her eyes, and set her countenance for what was to come.

The dentist started drilling, and I patted and rubbed Grace’s legs.

When he was finished, he looked up at me and said, in flawless English: “I’m going to fill her cavity using a less expensive material, since it’s only a baby tooth.”

I was shocked. English!

Suddenly, I got visions of the other kids, the dental work that had been neglected for years because we couldn’t afford it in the States and weren’t comfortable with it in China.

“Can I take my other two kids in for dental exams and cleanings?” I asked.

“No problem,” he said. “But I only work here on Mondays.”

“Only on Mondays?” I asked.

“The rest of the week I work on the other side of town,” he said, then went on to mention the famous dental clinic that the lady at the medical clinic had tried to direct me to.

A famous clinic that would have involved a long, lurching bus ride.

But one I didn’t have to take, because this very competent English-speaking dentist was working at the clinic across the street from our campus on Monday, the exact day I needed him. I paid the bill, about 180 yuan, or $28, cheap even by Chinese standards.

Grace and I walked home triumphantly.

“Mom, he did a really good job!” she said.

“Yes, he did,” I answered.

“And I was really brave,” she said.

“Yes, you were,” I said.

We got home and I started to make dinner. I had to cook the bread in the toaster oven first; once it was baked, I started to boil the spaghetti. But it was no big deal; the bread needed to cool down anyway. Before the spaghetti was fully cooked, I moved it off the burner to finish cooking on its own so I could heat up the sauce, since we only have one burner. I reflected as I made dinner: Grace’s trip to the dentist had hardly affected our routine at all—it was just a blip.

You know, living in China has a lot of joys.

I got the photo from http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/scared-to-the-back-teeth-then-blessed-relief/ and it in no way relates to our own experience.

My introductory anthropology textbook states that the ability to store wealth is a key culture marker between societies that forage (hunter/gatherers) and societies that engage in intensive agriculture. If there is no ability to store wealth, then there is no motivation to live other than day-by-day. Why catch fifty fish if you eat three and the other forty-seven simply spoil? Why make more than one set of clothes when you are a migratory society, and must travel light?

Storage is such a key anthropological concept because once wealth can be stored there is motivation to produce a surplus. And once a surplus can be produced, then not everyone needs to be involved in food production. The surplus supports bureaucrats and warriors and craft specialists and leads to political organization and taxes and civilization. But ultimately, the ability, or lack of ability, to store leads to a completely different life rhythm.

Right now I am in the midst of this shift in rhythm. In the US, where I was just days ago, I went to Safeway with my minivan and piled in groceries that I took home and stuffed into cupboards.

But here in China, I have no such capacity for storage. I can only buy what I can carry in cloth bags with my two hands (or an extra bag if I take one of my children with me). Even if I could buy a lot, my kitchen here on the 17^th floor is so small that if my husband needs to come in and grab a beer from the fridge, I step out and wait for him to finish. There is just no room to store other than what we can eat in the next few days. That means shopping is an everyday task, something never finished. I’m always foraging, keeping a shopping bag with me, running out of milk or bread or eggs.

And that simple matter of storage completely changes my daily rhythm. I cannot plan meals in advance, for shopping must be done daily, continuously. We eat one day at a time, buying what we need for that day and rarely for more beyond that.

Likewise Chris knows that our family’s laundry is his daily chore. We don’t have a dryer, so laundry simply cannot pile up day after day; we would never recover if it did. Every morning he does one or two loads of laundry, and hangs the clothes up to dry on our drying balcony, just like all of our Chinese neighbors.

And somehow, with our daily shopping and laundering, with our rhythm so altered, our thinking changes as well. Planning becomes less of a priority. For our summers in the US we follow a careful schedule planned far in advance, making sure we can fit everything in and getting crabby at last minute additions.

In China we live entirely last minute, even next week feels somewhat misty and ephemeral. It’s much easier to accomplish today’s work today and let tomorrow worry about itself.

Our minds have lost their ability for storage, and only have room for a day or two at the most. But with that, come some advantages. There are fewer things to keep track of. There’s just less clutter. There’s more room for spontaneity. Actually, it’s a nice way to live.

A few years ago I was taking a nap on Saturday afternoon in my apartment in Shandong Province, China, when my daughter Katherine rang me on the intercom from outside.

“Mom, Shei Hanshao and Grace got into a fight. Shei Hanshao said she wouldn’t play with Grace. Then Grace hit her, and Shei Hanshao started to cry. And…well…can you just come down?”

Shei Hanshao was a good friend of Katherine and Grace, my two daughters. She was a sweet girl with a bit of a flair for the dramatic, one of the neighborhood pack my girls ran around with during the four years we lived here in China. I walked downstairs into the courtyard. Four girls were lined up waiting for me. In the center were Katherine and her friend Bing Bing, on both ends were Grace and Shei Hanshao, wearing matching offended looks.

“Grace, did you hit Shei Hanshao?” I asked.

Grace immediately burst into tears.

“Ayi (Auntie),” began Shei Hanshao, “Grace hit me here and it hurt.”

“Shei Hanshao,” I said, “Grace should not have hit you, and I’m sorry it hurt, but I think you said some words that hurt Grace.”

Katherine then interjected. “Mom, Shei Hanshao also said something else. She said that Americans said Chinese people were dogs.” She looked at me quizzically.

Immediately I remembered the sign that supposedly hung in front of a park in Shanghai during the early days of the twentieth century: “No Dogs or Chinese allowed.” I had heard that though widely accepted as fact, there was no evidence that there ever existed such a sign.

“Shei Hanshao, Americans didn’t say that Chinese were dogs,” I said. “Shi bu dui de.” It’s not true.

“No, it is true,” she informed me, “My father told me.”

Now I was in a difficult position. “Well, even if it were true, there are a lot of Americans, and most of them are good even if one said a bad thing. Just like there are a lot of Chinese, and even if one does something bad, that doesn’t make all of them bad, and it doesn’t make you bad.”

I sighed. “Shei Hanshao, Chinese and Americans are friends.”

She nodded her head, but I don’t know if I convinced her. After all, why should she believe me over her own father. I turned my attention to Grace. It took some coaxing, but she finally came around and apologized to Shei Hanshao. “Mei guanxi,” said Shei Hanshao. It doesn’t matter.

Katherine and Bing Bing both gave Shei Hanshao pointed looks.

“I’m sorry too,” she said.

Grace still needed some comfort, and continued to sit on my lap. I thought about Shei Hanshao and her parents, whom we have known for nearly four years now. We have walked our children to school together, we have greeted each other on the street, and our children have attended each other’s birthday parties. Shei Hanshao’s father was an amiable fellow, always smiling, often greeting me with an English “Hello!”

That night I researched the sign on the Internet. The park in question, located at the end of the Bund in Shanghai, is called Huangpu Park. From when it was built in 1868 to 1928 it had various signs at the gate with a lists of regulations. Most often, the first regulation stipulated its intention as a park exclusively for the foreign community. Another regulation said no dogs or bicycles were allowed. China scholars Robert A. Bickers and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, in an article in China Quarterly, said they found no evidence for the popular belief in a “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed” sign, although such a sign did appear in the 1973 Bruce Lee movie The Chinese Connection.

But regardless of the scholars’ findings, in the popular Chinese mind, the sign did exist. And that is all that matters. And frankly, sign or no sign, we must admit that the underlying sentiment, that the Chinese were inferior, was likely present. For there was a time when the Western powers, with their thoughts and their actions, treated the Chinese with less dignity than they ought. This sign, allegedly posted at the turn of the last century, was just a symbol of previous humiliation. Yet it was casting its long shadow over a playground in 2010, forcing my seven- and eight-year-old daughters to answer for events of a hundred years past.

Chinese have a fundamentally different relationship with their history than we Americans. History is a subject we study in school. But wars took place in faraway lands. Our individualism means that our collective history, as Americans, is once removed from our identity. World War I and the Great Depression and the Smoot-Hawley tariff are events in history books. They are studied, they are even interesting, but they are not that connected to who we are.

Not so the Chinese. History, for Chinese, is not book knowledge. Rather, their history is carried along with them, as they walk along the way, an unseen burden, an invisible shadow; unconscious, and therefore, powerful. We Americans read about history. The Chinese experience it like reaching back into their own memory.

Katherine, Bing Bing, and Shei Hanshao began playing a game in the courtyard. Grace was interested, though she still sat on my lap. A few minutes later Shei Hanshao approached and asked her if she wanted to play. Grace was off like a flash and the four girls scampered off together as children do, whether in the East or West, their recent troubles quickly forgotten.

The U.S. and China have also had their recent troubles. We lecture China about human rights, pressure China to revalue its currency, and blame China for our trade imbalance. But we would do better to take a longer view. We should look beyond today’s troubles and instead embark upon a mission that is more vital and more foundational: recast our role in China’s history.

We in the China adoption community have our cherished myths. These myths have filled in the white spaces of our children’s histories, filled in the unknowns not covered by the official government papers: the police report, the referral report, and the abandonment certificate.

The myth usually goes something like this. Our daughter was born into a poor rural family that refused to raise her because she was a girl and they needed to leave the slot open for a boy. So the mother took her baby to a crowded area where the baby would be found quickly, watched from afar as the baby was discovered, then quickly disappeared. The baby was brought to an overcrowded orphanage where she languished at the hands of overworked nannies until she could be adopted, and join her forever family.

The trouble is, the majority of the myth is false.

The Chinese writer Xinran, in Letters from an Unknown Chinese Mother, first cast aside our myth about the uncaring, unfeeling birth mother who cared only for a son. Xinran gained access to mothers we foreigners will never be able to, and showed us that they do love and they do care, and they face pressures greater than we can imagine. When my daughter Grace begins to ask questions about her birth mother, this is the book I will give her.

Then there is the myth of the uncaring orphanage. Some such orphanages have existed, such as Kay Bratt documented in Silent Tears or “The Dying Rooms.” When we first arrived in Tai’an the girls and I visited the local orphanage. I was touched by the love and affection I saw pass between the aunties and the children, especially some of the special needs children. We didn’t visit again, for I thought the visit by some Western family trying to do good to satisfy our own needs would simply interfere with the nannies who were there every single day loving and raising those children. And other babies were raised in foster families, families that loved these children they were bound to lose, giving them love during that irreplaceable beginning.

The story about the birth mother bringing her newborn child to a crowded place is most certainly false. The Chinese have a tradition and belief called zuo yuezi, in which the month following childbirth is critical to the mother’s future health (and future childbearing). I have researched this custom, followed by migrant workers and PhD candidates alike, and found the tradition in no way diminished by Westernization. And the most important part is that no outside air—what the Chinese call “wind”—should reach the new mother and enter her bones. Therefore, newborn babies and new mothers are never seen in public in China. They are safely ensconced away from drafts or outside air. A young mother with a newborn baby would cause quite a scene indeed. Given this concern for the mother’s future health (and future childbearing) it is nearly impossible that the birthmother left her home with her newborn baby for the purpose of abandonment.

Recently, Brian Stuy has cast doubt on our most cherished myth of all, the abandonment of our daughters. In a recent blog post, Brian makes a convincing case that our daughters were not abandoned at all, but rather relinquished. After realizing that our own daughter’s abandonment certificate was incorrect, a discovery I wrote about in Home is a Roof, hearing stories from other adoptive families, and simply knowing Chinese culture better after living there for six years, I tend to agree.

China is a relationship society. In a country not under the rule of law, the Chinese survive with the help of their relationships. As an example, in Tai’an everyone I knew had learned in advance the gender of their unborn child, even though giving out such information is illegal. They knew because they had some kind of relationship with the ultrasound technician.

One adoptive mother told me her daughter was “found” by someone who had found several other babies in a short amount of time, then stopped finding any and refused to talk about it. I believe what happened in this case, and likely many others as well, is that someone with a relationship with the orphanage helped out families who were in a tough position, having a daughter when they needed a son. The daughter was not abandoned at all, but rather relinquished to this go-between, who brought her to the orphanage.

Now thinking about our myths—the unfeeling mother, the uncaring orphanage, the abandonment of our daughters—they made us into the rescuers. But they did so at the expense of the birth mothers, the Chinese people, and ultimately, at the expense of our daughters. So it is time we abandoned our myths. They were rather self-serving anyway.

And we need to replace our myths with a new story. A story that is as accurate as we can make it, yet still honors our children and the land from which they came.

I had a nightmare two nights before my reading at Village Books in Bellingham.

The microphone wasn’t working and the venue had to be moved outdoors. Just as we were ready to begin, I suddenly realized I had forgotten my computer. And that would have been dreadful; I would have no slide show, and nowhere to divert attention off of me and me alone.

I woke up.

And I had to face my fear that I would not only be reading, but making my entire 320-page memoir available to people who ACTUALLY KNEW ME. These were not nameless faceless strangers who I would be exposing myself to, but rather, those I would run into on Front Street, or after church, or at the Lynden Fair. Somehow, on those days I actually allowed myself to imagine that his book would ever get published, I never imagined people I knew would be reading it.

But my fears have proved unfounded. Although my weaknesses and characters flaws have been exposed, they have not judged. I have felt so much incredible love and support from my hometown as they have embraced HOME IS A ROOF: the article in the Lynden Tribune, the traffic on Facebook, the encouraging comments on the street as I run errands.

If that were it, I would be completely content,but the outpouring of support at my book reading at Village Books last night was tremendously meaningful. It is at times like this that I feel so strongly that I am, and always will be, part of a community. That I have a place where I will always belong, no matter how far I travel (and I have traveled far). That I will always know where I come from.

Thank you to everyone who came and supported the local girl.

Last night the five of us ate dinner at my parents’ house, and both my parents commented again, as they have several times since Home is a Roof was published, at how different the book is from the manuscript they read early on.

“How many edits did you go through?” my dad asked.

Over the several years it has taken this book to be first lived, then journaled, shaped into a manuscript, and finally find its winding way through the process of finding an agent and a publisher, the edits are so numerous I could not put a number on them.

But Dad was insistent, so I finally said, “Somewhere between twenty and fifty edits.”

The conversation forced me to remember some of the revisions along this journey to publication. There were the edits that I did a day or two after initial piecing together a chapter. The Thesaurus function on my computer was my friend during those days. There were middle-of-the-night edits, when sentences that refused to be formed during the day suddenly broke through, and I walked through our dark apartment in search of pen and paper to write the words down before they vanished. Chris would wake up and find scraps of paper in the kitchen on top of the fridge with phrases, sentences, or even whole paragraphs written on them in somnolent, illegible handwriting.

Then there were full manuscript edits. There was the edit I did while reading the entire manuscript out loud. And the edit I did after reading Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Or the edit I did after reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Or the edit I did after reading Noah Lukeman’s A Dash of Style. There was the revision I did after letting the manuscript lay fallow for three months. There was the time I took my pin drive down Ying Sheng Road, printed off all 400 pages of manuscript, and carried it home so I could edit using a red pen on white pages with black print, and find things that eluded me when I stared at a blurry computer screen. There was the edit I did as I read the manuscript to my kids during evening story time. And the revision I did in the Bellingham library one summer while they attended a local vacation Bible school. There were edits to remove words that I relied on too much, such as “actually” or “but” or “virtually,” or to get rid of unnecessary adjectives or adverbs. There was the revision I did in Beijing after two rounds of passes by major publishers, when I felt I finally had put my finger on what was missing from the narrative arc.

It was the revisions that forced me to dig deep.

There were some chapters that emerged fully formed, and hardly required any editing at all. The last chapter, “Relationships” was like this. I wrote that in a somewhat smoky Internet café in Tai’an a few days after those events transpired, and it materialized nearly fully formed.

But then there was the first chapter, “Gate”, which is unrecognizable from my early efforts, and emerged as I struggled through the query process to articulate exactly what this book was truly about. I remember going on a long run through polluted Tai’an, and the exact moment of my long uphill trek home when that germinating seed finally burst through my subconscious.

Most descriptions of my husband Chris and our relationship came about through revisions. I had pages and pages filled with aspects of Chinese culture that I found fascinating, or interactions with my children I found frustrating. But I had no such source material for my relationship with Chris; I considered that aspect of my life rather normal and everyday, even mundane, not worth writing about. But my early readers, including my parents and my agent, felt something was missing. I’m now quite proud of how Chris emerged on the page. I think I captured the essence of his personality. My husband says the manuscript finally sold when it had “more Chris.”

At the end of each edit, I really thought I was finished. I had no idea of the revisions yet to come. But now as I’m finally holding the finished product in my hand, I know it has been cured through time, and I hope it is subtle and savory as a result.