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A review by myjourneywithbooks
The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin
4.0
I find that a child narrator, if written well, lends a certain simple and innocent perspective to the story that I really enjoy reading. In The Unpassing, the main character, the eight year old second child of an immigrant Taiwanese family in Alaska, contacts meningitis and falls into a sort of coma. He wakes up to be greeted by the knowledge that his beloved younger sister Ruby had caught meningitis from him but, unlike him, she had not survived.
The story that follows chronicles how each member of the family deals with Ruby's death. The father, a hard-working but beaten down man who works as a plumber and repairman, is sued for a mistake he makes at work. This, compounded by Ruby's death, leads to a rift between him and the highly emotional mother. The children in their turn each display their grief in their own individual ways.
The Unpassing is a melancholic coming-of-age story where not a lot happens; it is definitely more character driven than plot driven. I did initially wish I could feel a deeper connection to the characters but in retrospect I felt that the distance that is always maintained between the reader and the characters reflects to some degree the distance the narrator feels when it comes to his parents.
On the surface it is the story of a family dealing with the loss of a child, but on a deeper level it also deals with the feelings of isolation, inadequacy and not belonging that immigrants might feel, about how the golden dream might actually turn out to be a mirage and what this could mean for the children of parents who leave their homeland to pursue a better life.
I felt like this last part was beautifully captured in this quote from the book: "It was a kind of violence, what my father had done. He had brought us to a place we didn't belong and taken us from a place we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none."
.
It did take me a while to get into this book and I did give up on it once only to pick it up again a few weeks later and get engrossed in it after a few chapters. Beautifully written and a worthy debut.
The story that follows chronicles how each member of the family deals with Ruby's death. The father, a hard-working but beaten down man who works as a plumber and repairman, is sued for a mistake he makes at work. This, compounded by Ruby's death, leads to a rift between him and the highly emotional mother. The children in their turn each display their grief in their own individual ways.
The Unpassing is a melancholic coming-of-age story where not a lot happens; it is definitely more character driven than plot driven. I did initially wish I could feel a deeper connection to the characters but in retrospect I felt that the distance that is always maintained between the reader and the characters reflects to some degree the distance the narrator feels when it comes to his parents.
On the surface it is the story of a family dealing with the loss of a child, but on a deeper level it also deals with the feelings of isolation, inadequacy and not belonging that immigrants might feel, about how the golden dream might actually turn out to be a mirage and what this could mean for the children of parents who leave their homeland to pursue a better life.
I felt like this last part was beautifully captured in this quote from the book: "It was a kind of violence, what my father had done. He had brought us to a place we didn't belong and taken us from a place we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none."
.
It did take me a while to get into this book and I did give up on it once only to pick it up again a few weeks later and get engrossed in it after a few chapters. Beautifully written and a worthy debut.