Adopted Aliens (Digging to America - Anne Tyler)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Digging to America - Anne Tyler
Date:	31/07/07 (211 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good story, good characters, enjoyable read

Disadvantages: none for me

Who is an American? Besides the people who’ve lived in the US of A since the founding of the state also every immigrant who’s got the permit to live there; technically that’s right, of course, but it takes more than a piece of paper to make a foreigner a member of the American society. The idealistic idea of the melting pot has long been abandoned, the salad bowl or the mosaic are favoured now, a mixture but with the individual ingredients still discernable. Digging To America is about ‘real’ Americans, as American as Big Macs, first and second generation immigrants and brand new arrivals and how they get along with each other.

The setting is Baltimore, the time the summer of 1997; two families meet at the airport waiting for two baby girls from Korea they’ve adopted long distance, Bitsy and Brad Donaldson have brought their whole tribe, all decorated with buttons “MOM”, “DAD”, “GRANDMA”, “GRANDPA” (twice over), aunts, uncles, cousins, the other family consists of only three members, Sami and Ziba Yazdan and Sami’s mother Maryam, she and her daughter-in-law Ziba have immigrated from Iran, Sami was born in the USA.

They take the girls and head home and this could be it, but two weeks after this day Bitsy calls the Yazdans (the only ones in the telephone directory and thus easy to find), she suggests they get together to help each other if need be, to give the girls the opportunity to play together so that both would have a Korean playmate, and to generally become friends. Later she has the idea to celebrate Arrival Day, yearly celebrations of the day the girls arrived - one year at the Donaldsons‘, the following year at the Yazdans’ and so on.

Bitsy’s and Brad’s daughter keeps her Korean name, Jin-Ho, whereas Sami and Ziba Yazdan change Sooki into Susan, the Donaldsons can’t understand this, they try to raise Jin-Ho as Korean as they’re able to. Interestingly, Jin-Ho asks to be called Jo when she’s still in pre-school and longs for an American Girl doll. The Donaldsons have very clear ideas about child raising and integration into the American way of life and give the Yazdans unasked for advice on nearly everything. They come over as rather ridiculous, they mean well, but they’re bossy in their affection, especially Bitsy is hard not to laugh at with her New Age interests, a bit of weaving, teaching yoga, poetry, a bit(sy) of everything that’s en vogue at the time. The Yazdans aren’t repelled, though, at least Sami and Ziba aren’t, they’re happy to have found American friends and even move into a house near the Donaldsons so that the girls can be nearer to each other, improbable as it is, they strike up a lasting friendship.

The novel doesn’t have a closely knit plot, so there’s nothing to spoil, the first part focuses on the development of the girls and is occasionally quite funny but after the description of the third or forth Arrival Day party the reader feels that enough is enough, fortunately the author felt the same and shifted the focus on Maryam Yazdan, and we see arriving in a foreign country, adapting or trying to and belonging or not from a different point of view. She grew up in Tehran and emigrated in the days of the Shah, leaving for America to marry a doctor already established in Baltimore, she becomes a widow in her forties, when we meet her, she’s been in America for 35 years. Although she doesn’t dwell in the past like some of her friends, she still considers herself an outsider and is proud of it. She’s a dignified and elegant lady, even some of her Iranian friends find her arrogant.

It’s not that she dislikes Americans but she doesn’t want them to impose themselves on her. She’s ensconced herself in her life but is made to reflect on her attitude when Dave, Bitsy’s father, who’s lost his wife to cancer, falls in love with her. She likes him very much, but . . . Isn’t her cultivated foreignness a shield to protect her against possible harm? But does she want to leave her shell at the end of her life and risk something new? She has to come to terms with herself and watching her doing so is fascinating, Anne Tyler has created a great character with Maryam.

I didn’t know this author before I chanced on this book, when I looked up her name on the net, I learnt that Digging To America is her 17th novel and that she’s a widely read and famous author. Btw, her husband was an Iranian so that we can be sure that the Iranian bits of the novel are spot on. Obviously her favourite subject is the American family with all its facets, she seems to have a unique style, one critic calls her “America’s foremost Nutrasweet novelist.” Well, I can’t speak for her whole oeuvre as I’ve read only this book, but in my opinion there isn’t too much sweetness in Digging To America. Tyler is humane and doesn’t expose her characters, even Bitsy who so often behaves ridiculously is treated with dignity after all. And then, I’ve got nothing against a bit of sweetness if it isn’t all there is to a novel; Digging To America touches many subjects I find worth writing about, many more than I’ve mentioned here, as another critic put it, “Tyler’s writing is light in texture, but very filling”.

The title is inspired by the children’s game of digging a hole to China. Jin-HO asks her grandfather if the children in China are “digging to America”. “Wouldn’t that be cool?” she asks. “They’d pop out of the ground one day when me and my friends were playing. They’d say, ‘Hey! Where are we?’ I’d say, ‘Baltimore, Maryland’.

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Vintage
336 pages
RRP 7.99 GBP

Summary: a moving story of how to belong