Overview

England, 2015. Madelyn dreads telling her young children about her mother, who died by suicide decades earlier. But when her child asks about skin tone and eye color, she's compelled to share the painful truth. A Cantonese village, 1895. Emigrating to America seems inevitable for teenage Song, whose family is starving during a drought. His grandmother tells him about Chinese emigrants' ordeals and predicts a fate that will bring tragedy upon his descendants. Oakland, 1921. Henri is held responsible for a theft at his brother-in-law's store. By 1955, he owns the store but resents his business rival, whose philandering son has married Henri's daughter Corri. San Francisco Bay Area, 1995. Corri relies, perhaps too much, on kindness and spirituality to get her through life. She shares a crucial poem with her granddaughter Madelyn. Staring into the Sun links memoir and the true stories of a Chinese American family. From the reverberations of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the glamour of a millionaire, a magician, and a model, this collection lays bare one family's tragedies and triumphs.

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9781645387046

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Reviews

""Postman takes on an ambitious scope: recounting multiple generations of her ancestors' immigration to America, their successes and losses, and bravely confronting her mother's suicide in the process. She skillfully weaves narration throughout the book and handles difficult topics with sensitivity and grace.""-Chris Lu, former U.S. Ambassador, Deputy Secretary of Labor, White House Cabinet Secretary""Madelyn Postman's beautiful book traces the roots of her Chinese American family in a quest to understand a painful secret she's borne since before she can remember. Her writing about love, family, and identity is unique, unvarnished, and deeply moving.""-Quil Lawrence, NPR Correspondent and author of Invisible Nation (Walker Books, 2009)""Staring into the Sun is a prismatic exploration of those intergenerational forces that invisibly infiltrate our lives and shape who we become. In this genealogical voyage spurred by loss, readers meet an ensemble cast of characters from different times, from different cultural milieus, all of whom point the way back home, to a rediscovery of family and self. An ambitious work of introspection that evocatively links biography with history.""-M. F. Alvarez, PhD, author of The Paradox of Suicide and Creativity: Authentications of Human Existence (Lexington Books, 2020) and Unraveling: An Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal (Routledge, 2023)

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