We Carry Smoke and Paper
Melody S. Gee
Belletristik / Romanhafte Biographien
Beschreibung
Answering an unexpected call to faith in her thirties, Melody Gee contends with what saying "e;yes"e; to conversion requires of an adopted daughter of Chinese immigrants. Faced with a new framework for her place in the world, grief and doubt shadow her tentative steps toward becoming a believer. She looks for answers and consolation in her family's story of immigration trauma and cultural assimilation, in the ways their burdens and limitations made her answer-seeking both impossible and inevitable.In essays that explore the parallels between conversion and language acquisition, isolated liturgies, cultural inheritances, stalled initiations, disrupted storytelling, and adoption, Gee examines conversion s grief and hope, losses and gains, hauntings and promises. We Carry Smoke and Paper is a memoir about what we owe to those who sacrifice everything for us, and it is about the many conversions in a lifetime that turn our heads via whispers and shouts, calling us to ourselves.
