The journalist examines her relationships with her mother, her Chinese mother-in-law, and her adopted daughter in the memoir The Year of the Water Horse.

What inspired you to write this book?

I was already writing about adopting our daughter from my husband’s ancestral region of China, where his mother was forced to abandon her firstborn daughter during the civil war. The symmetry between their stories, one child taken from a land where the other had been left behind, felt almost too poetic. I realized I had to put my own story alongside it. I needed to embrace how clumsy I would be as a white woman trying to convey these pieces of my Chinese mother-in-law’s story; it gave me permission to dig into my feelings about loss and survival.

How did you start braiding the two stories together?

I asked what this journey of adoption did for me. What did it make me think about motherhood, my siblings, my mom and dad? When I brought my own narrative into it, things started to connect. I didn’t know my daughter and the child my mother-in-law left behind were the same astrological sign, separated by 60 years, for example. I was also connecting my feelings about abandonment and loss with what my mother and my mother-in-law were telling me about their lives. It was like putting the sands of my entire life into this colander, sifting,
and seeing what comes out and what stays behind.

Did you find it difficult to dig into the darker moments of your early life?

I didn’t. What I found difficult was making it all make sense. As a journalist, you are never the story, but in a memoir, you have to be, and I had to learn to let myself go there. That was the revelatory part to me: figuring out how to shape this narrative as the primary person it was happening to.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

It’s a story about survival: what we endure, how we endure it, and what it does to us, good and bad. Encountering my mother-in-law’s story allowed me to evolve and forgive my own mother for many things, to learn that so rarely is something entirely one person’s fault. In the end, this is not a memoir about one thing. The common thread—in the life that I’ve lived so far, the life that my mother-in-law lived, and that the other women in the book lived—is enduring, while allowing ourselves to have joy, presence, and agency.