Digging to America

by Anne Tyler

An Anne Tyler book is like meeting an old friend. Her books include: The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons, Back When We Were Grownups, The Amateur Marriage, and twelve others. She is a writer whom I greatly enjoy because of her character development, her tapestries of families, and her unflashy mastery of plot. The people who are really at the heart of this book come from China, Iran, and Korea.

The novel opens at the Baltimore airport in 1997. Two families await the arrival of their adopted Korean baby girls. The Donaldsons, Bitsy and Brad, await with an All-American entourage complete with buttons, balloons, video cameras, infant seat, grandparents, etc. Completely unnoticed is the other expectant couple, Sami and Ziba Yazdan, foreign looking, olive skinned, and lingering on the sidelines, balloonless. Only Sami’s reserved mother, Iranian born, Maryam, accompanies them. Improbably, the two families strike up a lasting friendship.

What fuses two such mismatched families into a lasting friendship? At first, it is the introduction of the “arrival party” conceived by the Donaldsons as a way of helping their daughters “fit in.” The “arrival party” complete with video and theme song become an annual celebration and become the novel’s structure; a way we can check in on the development of the two families over the years.

Bitsy is the culturally sensitive super-mom so pleased with her daughter’s chic foreignness; she and her husband, Brad, do everything to celebrate it. They name their daughter Jin-Ho and even read her Korean folk tales, dress in a kimono and little embroidered shoes. While Ziba who is Chinese and her Iranian-American husband Sami, immediately name change their daughter’s name from Sooki to Susan and become “American.”

Maryam, Sami’s mother, finds the Donaldsons enthusiasm for all things foreign annoying. Gradually, Maryam becomes the focus of the novel. Through breaks in Maryam’s stoic exterior, the author allows us to view a larger America. “Americans are all larger than life. You think if you keep company with them you will be larger too, but then you see that they’re making you shrink: they’re expanding and edging you out.” Still, Maryam desires to belong. After 31 years in American, she confesses, “It’s a lot of work, being foreign. Through Maryam, Anne Tyler demonstrates that “we all think the others belong more.”

The book is a satisfying read just for the characters and plots, but even more so because it makes the reader become more aware of the barriers of culture and the disappointments on all sides.

(by Anne Frame, Guest Columnist)