Year She Left Us (Ma)

The Year She Left Us 
Kathryn Ma, 2014
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062273345


Summary
The Kong women are in crisis. A disastrous trip to visit her "home" orphanage in China has plunged eighteen-year-old Ari into a self-destructive spiral. Her adoptive mother, Charlie, a lawyer with a great heart, is desperate to keep her daughter safe.

Meanwhile, Charlie must endure the prickly scrutiny of her beautiful, Bryn Mawr–educated mother, Gran—who, as the daughter of a cultured Chinese doctor, came to America to survive Mao's Revolution—and her sister, Les, a brilliant judge with a penchant for ruling over everyone's lives.

As they cope with Ari's journey of discovery and its aftermath, the Kong women will come face-to-face with the truths of their lives—four powerful, intertwining stories of accomplishment, tenacity, secrets, loneliness, and love.

Beautifully illuminating the bonds of family and blood, The Year She Left Us explores the promise and pain of adoption, the price of assimilation and achievement, the debt we owe to others, and what we owe to ourselves. Full of pathos and humor, featuring a quartet of unforgettable characters, it marks the debut of an important new voice in American fiction. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Stanford University; J.D., University of California
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California


Kathryn Ma is the author of the widely-praised novel The Year She Left Us. Her story collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. The book was also named a San Francisco Chronicle “Notable” Book, and a Los Angeles Times “Discoveries” Book. She received the David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction, and the honor of being named a San Francisco Public Library Laureate.

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Kathryn is the daughter of parents who emigrated from China. Her stories have appeared in the Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Slice, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Kathryn was a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. In 2011, she was a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Saint Mary's College of California.

Kathryn holds a bachelor’s degree with distinction and a master’s degree in history from Stanford University. She earned a JD from the University of California, Berkeley and practiced law for a number of years in San Francisco. She is an active volunteer in the arts and education, serving previously as the founding board chair of the San Francisco Friends School and currently on the Board of Directors of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. She’s been a member of the True to the Mood book club for thirty years. Kathryn lives with her family in San Francisco. The Year She Left Us is her first novel. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The foundling may be a familiar figure in the history of the novel, most prominently in Dickens and the Brontës, but Ma gives us a striking 21st-century iteration. In 1992, China passed a law allowing foreign adoptions. Since then, Americans have brought home more than 80,000 Chinese children—most of them girls, because of China’s infamous one-child policy and a cultural prejudice that favors sons....  Like Philip Roth and, more recently, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ma is unafraid to generalize about her culture and explore its snobberies and social codes.
Mona Simpson - New York Times Book Review


A deft, raw dissection of an American family….With great cleverness, Ma injects her Chinese family with American realism.
Rebecca Liao - San Francisco Chronicle


In telling Ari Kong’s quest, Ma succeeds in creating a deeply intelligent heroine as compelling as Holden Caulfield and Alexander Portnoy….The Year She Left Us is a fresh, compelling look at the ties that bind among all the kinds of families that we create.
May-Lee Chai - Dallas Morning New


There’s much to enjoy in The Year She Left Us….It’s Ari’s voice that sets this novel on fire….The magnetism exerted by Ari’s chapters is all the more impressive because for much of the book, the character’s misery seems to float free of her circumstances.
Laura Miller - Salon


(Starred review.) Ma’s first novel is a sweeping success—a standout from the many novels about Chinese assimilation and the families of Chinese immigrants—with a fascinating protagonist with a troubling past.... This is a family saga of insight, regret, and pathos, and it is not to be missed.
Publishers Weekly


Ma turns conventional wisdom about adoption on its head in this probing novel about a young woman adopted from China as an infant. Ari is the kind of person who is abundant in real life but largely missing from fiction: a prickly, selfish, lost girl.... Ma brings all sorts of relationships.... And she painstakingly conveys that we are never just one thing, and can never be fixed by just one formula. —Lynn Weber
Booklist


A debut novel featuring a simple plot crammed with information—factual and emotional, conflicting and unreliable. The result is complicated, like real life.... The novel questions the meaning of family, background and belonging.Ma is a cagey writer, withholding and misdirecting at nearly every turn, which can be frustrating. Nonetheless, this is an impassioned, unapologetic look at tough, interesting subjects.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What are the various effects of having four different narrative voices: Ari and Gran’s chapters in first person, Charlie’s in third person and Les’s told from an omniscient point of view? Which do you find most compelling? Why?

2. Charlie names her adopted daughter Ariadne Bettina Yun-li Rose Kong as a gesture to positively influence her fate. What does each of these names represent? In what ways is naming a powerful and important act?

3. Allusions to classical mythology appear often in the novel, including the tale of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone. What does each add to the story? What purpose and place do mythological stories have in contemporary culture?

4. Gran warns Ari not to dwell in the past and to "look forward, look forward, look forward." Why is this? In what ways does she follow her own advice or not? What's the best way to handle difficult memories or past mistakes?

5. How might one explain Ari's profound act of self-injury? How does her experience in Alaska, along with her special connection to Gran, help her heal?

6. Should Ari have visited the orphanage she lived in as a baby? Why or why not? What do you make of the interesting act of holding the small, plastic camera in front of her face for much of the visit?

7. Ari’s best friend, A.J., has a very different view of visits to the orphanage than Ari does. What do the actions and feelings of the other Whackadoodle girls suggest about the range of adoption experiences?

8. Consider the forceful character of WeiWei. What does she bring to the story? How do WeiWei’s choices in life illustrate Gran’s words that “Need means there are no other options”?

9. Compare sisters Charlie and Les. What qualities does each have that are helpful or problematic for Ari? How do their professional lives affect the way they view family issues, and vice versa?

10. What do Steve and Peg Ericsson, the couple Ari lives with in Alaska, bring to the story? What do they show Ari about compassion, kindness and the nature of friendship and family?

11. What do Ari and Noah have in common, and how are their situations different? What does Ari learn from Noah that is helpful to her in her journey toward acceptance and understanding?

12. In an important moment of self-awareness, Ari wonders to herself: "If I didn't have real problems, why did I feel as if I did?" What does she mean by "real" problems? Can suffering be measured and compared in objective ways or is it always relative?

13. Burial and mourning are repeating motifs in the story. On Qingming, April 5, both Gran and Ari make visits to honor the dead. Later, Ari writes a letter to her biological parents and buries it on Lushan Mountain. Is there power in rituals, whether ancient or invented?

14. By the end of the book, we learn that each of the main characters has experienced a profound loss or separation. How do their intertwined stories build on the novel’s themes of identity, loss and healing?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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