THE STRENGTH OF WATER

A Chinese American woman looks back on poverty, war, and family betrayal in this heartfelt memoir.

Jensen writes in her mother Helen’s voice as she recaps Helen’s life story, starting with her childhood in Detroit in the 1920s and ’30s, where her father, Ho Sin, and mother, Bo-Ling, both Chinese immigrants, ran a laundry that barely provided for them and their six children. In 1936, after Bo-Ling’s death, Ho Sin returned to China with the children, remarried, and then returned to America, leaving them in the Tai Ting Pong village in the care of their new stepmother, Seam. Jensen paints a detailed portrait of the traditional village lives they led, which were culturally vibrant but materially austere, a problem exacerbated by their uncle Ho Huang, who gambled away the family’s farmland and brutalized his wife. In 1940, Ho Sin brought 17-year-old Helen to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she re-Americanized herself and waitressed at swanky eateries—her recollections of Chinatown are colorful and bustling. Later chapters describe her version of the American dream, with nice suburban houses and the resources to put her daughters through college. Jensen’s absorbing narrative spotlights the clash between old country and new—Ho Sin almost disowned Helen for waiting tables, a disreputable occupation for a woman from China, he believed—and the discrimination Chinese immigrants faced in America. It’s also a story of family values under the pressure of a poverty that forces agonizing trade-offs between love and material sustenance, as when Seam stirs her stepchildren’s resentment by giving her own daughter extra rice and sausage. Jensen relates all of this in richly evocative writing that sometimes achieves a plangent poetry. (“A man’s wife was his property….After each beating, Auntie would cry great sobs. Then she would be quiet for a while, and then she would gather herself to continue the day’s business.”) The result is an engrossing read that brings to life both the strength and adaptability of its subject and the wrenching changes she endured.

A classic, vividly written immigrant saga.