When life—as it is wont to do—feels frustrating, Karin Jensen has a ready-made reality check that instantly sets her back on track: stories written by her Chinese American mother, Helen. “Mine are first-world problems,” Jensen says with a laugh. “They’re not about growing up in poverty and hunger, worrying about whether I am going to live or die, feeling disowned by my father, or wondering where my husband is late at night.”

To wit, take getting her first book, The Strength of Water, published. After more than 20 years of collecting her mother’s immigrant stories, Jensen began her search for a publisher, writing one letter after another. “I started to think, This is tedious. How long am I going to continue doing this?” she says. “But then I reflected on all my mother has been through, and I was resolved to get her story published.”

The Strength of Water is told in Helen’s voice. Kirkus Reviews, which included it on the Indie Best List 2024, praises it as a “classic, vividly written immigrant saga…an engrossing read that brings to life both the strength and adaptability of its subject and the wrenching changes she endured.”

Stories included here range from Helen’s remembrances growing up in Detroit in the 1920s and ’30s as one of six children of Chinese immigrants (who ran a financially strapped laundry), her move to China after her mother died and her father remarried, and her life in a traditional village after her father returned to America. He sent for Helen when she was 17. “A plucky little girl,” as her daughter describes her, Helen vividly etches an inspiring, sometimes harrowing and fraught chronicle of her reach for the American dream, the discrimination she faced, her father’s devastating disapproval when she waitressed, and a bad marriage.

Jensen heard these stories all her life. “She used them as teaching moments,” she says. “My mother would say, ‘Boy, when I was growing up, this is how things were, and you don’t know how lucky you are.’ I have this sense it was therapeutic for her. They were hard times, and it might have been a way of processing for her.”

Growing up, what stood out for Jensen were “the more cinematic stories,” such as when her mother was leaving China with Japanese Zero fighter planes flying overhead:

We had hardly begun our journey when the guide returned from wherever he had gone. “Get up! Get up!” he yelled. “The Japanese!” Japanese Zero planes were suddenly flying low overhead, apparently observing our boat. Other passengers also jumped up, scrambled to gather their belongings, and began to run onto the deck. My guide also ran out, yanking me behind, and flagged a nearby river man on his punt.

“Boatman, come here,” the guide yelled. “Take us to the riverbank. We’ll pay you money!” Other passengers were also seeking means to evacuate the ship. But hearing my guide shouting at him with an offer of money, the man on his little punt drew close, and we quickly descended a ladder on the side of the junk and hopped in.

The Strength of Water’s title is taken from Lao Tzu’s maxim that “nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.” Or as Helen observes at one point, “I had the strength of water, which flows through cracks and low places, carves through mountains, and remains unaltered.”

Jensen was an eager audience for her mother’s stories. “I loved them,” she says. “They really stuck with me, and starting in college, I thought that someday I would want to write them down. It is astonishing to me that her upbringing in the Bay area and mine were so drastically different, and [that] such a huge change in our family could happen in one generation.”

The book was just over two decades in the making. “I never had time to get to it until after I was married in 2002. My husband got a job in New Zealand, and that’s when I got started in earnest. Before we left, I sat down and recorded interviews with her. She was very pleased, but she also said that she didn’t think anyone else would be interested outside our family. I told her that there was certainly an audience for this, that there were millions of immigrants who could relate to her experiences.”

Jensen’s parents instilled in her a love of education. Her father was a schoolteacher, and her mother was a waitress. “My mother literally said to me when I was little that if she had to, she would scrub floors on her hands and knees so I could go to college and not have to live the kind of life she had to,” Jensen says. “And I wanted to go to college. She always said that the more I learn, the more the world would open up to me. She didn’t have that chance, so it was important to her that I and my sister had those opportunities.”

Growing up in Piedmont, California, an upper-middle-class enclave on the East Bay across from San Francisco, Jensen says she felt like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. While classmates lived in huge, block-long mansions, attended debutante balls, and took trips to Europe, her family lived frugally in a two bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath house. “My mom insisted we live in that neighborhood because the school district was so good.”

Her mother also influenced her career. Jensen wanted to major in English literature, but her mother insisted she pursue something more practical. “I understand her perspective,” Jensen says. “She scrimped and saved for me to go to college; I needed to get a job that would pay well. I had a secondary interest in environmentalism, and so I ended up majoring in hazardous materials management. I did that for 20 years. It was okay. I wasn’t passionate about it, but I had the satisfaction of providing a useful service and earning a good salary.”

After her second daughter was born, she worked part time and started teaching dance to children. When the pandemic hit, she couldn’t teach in-person and stumbled on an ad looking for people to write local news stories. She was accepted. Later, her local newspaper, the Alameda Post, recruited her to write for them, which she still does.

Jensen also still teaches dance. “It’s fun to get out of the house and get my little kid fix,” she says with a laugh.

The Strength of Water is a celebration of the universal immigrant story: the people who came to this country and were integral to its growth, strength, and identity. “It’s important to hear these stories, to understand why these people came here, and to find a common ground of humanity,” Jensen says.

For those who may be inspired to chronicle their own parents’ stories, Jensen has a simple piece of advice: “I was blessed my mother was very open to talking. But my in-laws are Danish immigrants who lived through the German occupation of their country, and they didn’t want to talk about it. All I can say is to just ask. Start with simple things: Who were your friends? What was homework like? Common things are easier to talk about.”

If Helen’s stories were teachable moments for her daughter, what, then, did Jensen learn? “The most important lesson,” she shares, “is seeing what the human spirit is capable of.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer who has been published in the Washington Post, Town & Country Magazine, and on vanityfair.com.