Chia-Chia Lin
The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin explores the challenges of assimilation experienced by a Taiwanese immigrant family of six in Alaska. Set against Alaska’s beautiful but stark landscape and its unforgiving climate, the family struggles to adjust to life an unfamiliar country while dealing with personal grief.
The story unfolds through the first-person voice of Gavin, the eldest boy in the family. It flashes back to 1986 when the family experienced a terrible tragedy. Gavin was ten years old at the time. He wakes from a week-long coma after contracting meningitis to learn his three-year-old sister, Ruby, died from the virus.
Rather than openly grieving and sharing their loss, each family member reacts to the trauma by withdrawing emotionally. Their failure to discuss Ruby’s death prevents them from healing. Gavin’s profound guilt at infecting his sister permeates his perceptions through the rest of the novel as Ruby is never far from his mind. The mother, a strict, harsh, abrasive, and distant matriarch, is prone to erratic behavior and fits of verbal lashings. The father, riddled with grief at the death of his daughter, tries to do what is best for his family, but he is fragile and not up to the task. Gavin’s older sister, Pei-Pei, is headstrong and determined to go her own way. Five-year old Natty, the sibling closest to Ruby in age, cannot comprehend her loss. He worries she may be lost in the woods and insists they look for her.
Compounding the family’s grief is their poverty and alienation at being in an unfamiliar country. Gavin inherits his parents’ distrust of outsiders, including medical personnel and police. He feels his “otherness” in school because of the way he looks, dresses, and the food he eats. His life at home is fraught with an underlying tension ready to surface at any moment. His mother seethes with resentment at his father, constantly reminding him of his failures and inadequacies.
Gavin struggles to find a secure foothold, to make sense of what is happening as he watches his family slowly unravel before his eyes. His narrative unfolds in a series of half-understood, murky events peppered with snatches of his parents’ conversations. The absence of a cohesive plot reinforces his sense of bewilderment. The structure is episodic in nature. By the time Gavin is able to piece together what happened to Ruby, his parents have separated. As an adult, Gavin visits his extended family in Taiwan. But, here, too, he is an outsider. His feelings of alienation and separation haunt him wherever he goes. He recognizes he will “un-pass” for the rest of his life.
Told in spare, haunting prose, this is a complex, understated novel that intertwines several themes: the challenges facing a first-generation immigrant family; coping with the traumatic loss of a child; suppressed grief; isolation; alienation; poverty; the struggle to survive; detachment as a coping mechanism; a coming-of-age story; the failure of adequate parenting; the search for identity; the pain of childhood trauma; and the long-lasting legacy of outsider status.
A compelling novel exploring challenging and difficult themes. Highly recommended.