The night my mother met Bruce Lee : observations on not fitting in /

Being biracial is a topic often left out of the Great American Dialogue on Race. Oddly, even the U.S. Census dodges the question: "biracial" was not one of the myriad racial categories on the forms this year. Rekdal, half-Chinese, half-Norwegian, hailing from Washington State, cleverly dissects what it means to be biracial in America and overseas in this artful collection of essays. The essays recall experiences from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in America and as a student and teacher in Korea, Japan, and China. Rekdal artfully narrates the peculiar situations her dual identity has often placed her in, alternately funny, sad, poignant, or ironic. She probes nearly every possible relationship: lovers, friends, mother and daughter, father and daughter. The narrative structure is inventive and draws from her sharply honed skills as a poet. Some stories are told in a weaving, dreamlike fashion. Others are sharp and blunt. Tapped by the Village Voice as an up-and-coming "writer on the verge," Rekdal has a lot to say. --Ted Leventhal

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. EveryoneDblacks, 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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.)DPam Kingsbury, Florence, AL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A series of travelogues and memoirs linked by the subjects of race and identity. In 11 pieces ranging in length from mere paragraphs to several pages, Rekdal writes with candor and poetic deftness about experiences in her distant and recent life as a woman of half-Norwegian and half-Chinese descent. In Taipei she traveled with her Chinese mother (making one half of an odd pair whose intimacy confused concierges and shopkeepers), while in Korea (where she taught English at a girls’ high school in a small, conservative town) her lessons evolve into arguments about gender, sexuality, and their attendant mores. Rekdal doesn’t shirk from putting her inner self on the line; her intimate relationships with boyfriends and parents are subject to the same gimlet gaze as foreign places and people—and, depending on whether her travels are within the boundaries of the US or within the bank of her childhood memories, the tone of her collection shifts from the light-hearted and ironic to the ambiguous and even tragic. (A long memoir of Rekdal’s sixth-grade friendship with another student—a black girl from a white foster-family whose own struggle with self and world exacts a price—edges the story into deeper waters, for example.) Her account cannot quite be considered a memoir, nor is it entirely a collection of essays. Its cumulative but delicate strength lies primarily in the author’s narrative and descriptive skills (she has published poems and essays in several small journals), as well as its refusal to be anything more than anecdotal and matter-of-fact. The impish, nothing-to-it-ness of Mark Salzman’s Iron and Silk (as well as Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted ) comes to mind. Like its author, this is a hybrid—both casual and entertaining.