The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee:
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REVIEW BY VIVIAN A. WAGNER
Paisley Rekdal's The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee is a memoir of her life as the daughter of a Norwegian-American father and a Chinese-American mother. It is, as the subtitle suggests, a story about not fitting in. It is also a story about coming to terms with this alienation and even, perhaps, celebrating it. Everywhere Rekdal ends up—whether with host families on a trip to Japan when she was 20, on a Fulbright teaching fellowship in Korea, or in her hometown of Seattle—Rekdal continuously feels the uneasy sense that she doesn't fully belong to any one community. Her mother's parents may have been from China, but Rekdal herself was born in America, speaks English, and has only a cursory knowledge of Chinese culture. Her father's Norwegian roots are even more mysterious and distant. So where does she belong? Who is she? These questions haunt the book. Rekdal tells her tale through a series of stories focusing on her travels; her relationship with her mother, father, and other relatives; and her relationships with men. It begins with the story of her mother as a 16-year-old working in Diamond Chan's restaurant in Seattle and meeting an arrogant Chinese kid who she would realize many years later was Bruce Lee. The winding narrative then follows Rekdal as she visits Taiwan with her mother, stays for an extended period in Japan, teaches in Korea, vacations in the Philippines and finally takes a trip to Mississippi to research her great-aunt Opal's life in the South. Each of these stories stands on its own, and yet the stories weave together around the central theme of never quite feeling at home. Everywhere she goes Rekdal feels off-kilter and alone, longing to feel a part of a community but knowing that she never will. Neither "white" nor "Chinese," she lives in a twilight zone of identity. The final twist of the screw, however, is that through the writing of this memoir, Rekdal makes her experience, and her identity, real. Many of Rekdal's stories highlight how groups use story-telling to create identity, and by the end of the book her stories have done just that. Vivian A. Wagner, Ph.D., is a freelance writer who lives in New Concord, Ohio.
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