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I recently read The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston and it was one of the most impactful books I've read in a long, long time. I finished the whole thing over the course of about four days, mostly while commuting to and from work and during my lunch breaks. Whenever put my e-reader down I kept turning the pages back and forth over and over in my head. The book explores parent-child dynamics, immigrant identities, the creation and destruction of identity in a globalizing world, and the different cultural lenses through which we make sense of our realities in a way that just feels real. I strongly recommend reading it yourself if you haven't.

One of the things I was most amazed by was Kingston's ability to draw out the inner worlds of different characters in a way that feels fundamentally empathetic. In one chapter, we see California through the eyes of the narrator's mother, a woman from a small Chinese village who is now navigating a strange and alienating world of ghosts — White Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Hobo Ghosts, etc. Kingston transitions to the next chapter, told through the eyes of our second-generation Chinese-American narrator, via a second-hand account of the previous chapter's happenings through a story told by her brother and passed on through her younger sister. This re-retelling calls attention to the multiple levels of mediation that separate the world of the narrator from that of her mother — an inconceivable generational and cultural rift which belies their family connection.

A few points at the book made me emotional, which I suppose is unsurprising for a book that tackles themes of family trauma, illness, and loss. But one moment caught me off-guard and had me teary-eyed during my morning commute. The narrator is describing her struggles growing up as a child of immigrants, trying to acclimate to a world that is almost more unknown to her parents than it is to herself. There's many layers of this that I can't relate to from personal experience, but her description of trying to find her English voice spoke to the struggles I've been having learning Dutch in the Netherlands.

Pardon the lack of page numbers (e-reader), but this is from the first few pages of the chapter "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe."

When I went to kindergarten and had to speak English for the first time, I became silent. A dumbness — a shame — still cracks my voice in two, even when I want to say "hello" casually, or ask an easy question in front of the check-out counter, or ask directions of a bus driver... A telephone call makes my throat bleed and takes up that day's courage. It spoils my day with self-disgust when I hear my broken voice come skittering out into the open. It makes people wince to hear it. I'm getting better, though. Recently I asked the postman for special-issue stamps; I've waited since childhood for postmen to give me some of their own accord. I am making progress, a little every day.