By Kevin Brown
The Strength of Water tells the story of King Ying, a woman who spent part of her childhood in the United States, but then lived several years in a rural village in China before returning to the United States, where she would live the rest of her life. She endured the Great Depression, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and World War II, among other historic events, but, more importantly, she struggled to develop a sense of self in a family that was more focused on survival than affection. Her challenges continued into her twenties and thirties with a loveless marriage and economic hardships made even worse by the prejudices of twentieth century America. However, she finds ways to create a meaningful life for herself and her children through hard work, resourcefulness, and persistence.
Karin K. Jensen’s book is subtitled An Asian American Coming of Age Memoir, which is true on some level, but there’s a complication in the genre here. Traditionally, a memoir is the memory of the author of the book, but that’s not the case in this work. Instead, Jensen writes the book in her mother’s voice. The “I” of the memoir is not Jensen, but her mother, King Ying (or Helen, which is the English name Jensen’s mother goes by). That can cause confusion at times, but it does provide more immediacy than a third-person biography of Jensen’s mother would have.
One of the main aspects of King Ying’s life that Jensen wants readers to understand is the sexism she endured, both in China and the United States. Early in the work, readers learn that Chinese or Chinese American families refer to daughters as “a thousand pieces of gold,” which sounds like a compliment, but it’s actually a complaint about how much money a daughter will cost to raise, then marry into another family. A son, however, is a “million pieces of gold,” as they will return income and support to the family for the rest of the parents’ lives. Later, when King Ying has returned to her small village in China, a woman caught in adultery walks through the village with a sign around her neck and a man holding a cord around her waist, much like the Puritan punishments in the United States. Even as a girl, King Ying wonders where the man was who was also involved in the adultery.
When Helen divorces her first husband, Oliver (Lai), due to his infidelity, people begin to treat her differently at the restaurant where she works as a waitress. They even use the phrase “hot to trot” to describe her now that she’s a divorcee. She’s amazed at the change, especially since it was the 1970s, a time when she saw the world becoming more open to women. In fact, she had no desire to get married again and avoided many people’s attempts to set her up with their friends or family members.
Helen ultimately flips this idea of women as being lesser than men, as she was rather astute at real estate. When she did ultimately marry again, she convinced her husband to buy into additional properties, even buying one on her own—as she had done in her first marriage—when he wasn’t interested in adding one more to their portfolio. Several years later, they sold all of those properties for a profit, which enabled them to move into a neighborhood with a better school for their daughter, the author of this book. Kimmie—the name the family calls Jensen—reflects on her mother in a chapter near the end of the book, writing, “She taught me how wise money management is a powerful tool of feminine strength.” Rather than allowing society’s norms—whether Chinese or American—to define her as a weak woman, Helen succeeds economically and teaches her daughters to do the same and to see that success as the mark of a woman.
Another idea that Jensen weaves throughout her mother’s story is her struggle to fit into either culture, whether American or Chinese, given the time she spent in both countries when she was younger. When Helen is a young girl in the United States, she reads the Jane Arden comic strip and designs clothes for her, something a young white girl would do, but her classmates taunt her with racial slurs when she goes to school. While students at the school are celebrating traditional American holidays, her family doesn’t, so she feels left out, that typically second generation immigrant feeling of being torn between two cultures, though Helen is born in the United States. Then, when she returns to China, the villagers judge King Ying and her sisters for their hair and clothing, especially as females, leading Jensen to write, “It was immediately apparent that where we had been foreign in the country of our birth, we would also be foreign in the land of our heritage.” Throughout her childhood, even into her young adult years, King Ying is in a liminal state, not able to be her full self in either America or China.
That idea of being “betwixt and between” becomes even clearer when King Ying nearly dies while living in China. Her stepmother, Seam, believes that eating the wrong foods has been making King Ying sick, so she begins depriving her of the very foods that could nurture her back to health. Ultimately, Seam becomes convinced King Ying is going to die, so Seam lays her out on the death board, a board that every family had for laying out their dead, or, as Jensen describes it, “an intermediary space between life and burial, marking the passage from the world of the living to the ancestral realm.” Thankfully, Seam speaks with some women in the village, and one of them suggests making King Ying hom pei, rice bran, with water, which provides her the nutrients she needs to survive.
This woman is one of many people whom King Ying believes is sent by a guardian angel to help her through life. Jensen writes, “As difficult as my life had been, someone had always appeared to prevent me from falling into the worst straits at critical moments.” That’s especially true in her younger life, when she was much more dependent on others to help her, especially in getting to the United States. When she’s older, though, she lacks that help and struggles on her own. She suffers in the loveless marriage to Oliver, a gambling addict who is rarely home and often steals money from her to feed his habit. He won’t help raise their daughter, Stephanie, so Helen is unable to attend school to get a job other than waitressing, which she loves, but she wishes she could be a professional. Throughout her twenties and into her thirties, she suffers in this marriage, but, as the title of the book shows, she adapts and works to find whatever positive she can in her life.
That approach ultimately leads to a second marriage, which is much happier. In fact, the final third or so of the book moves much more quickly, chronologically-speaking, than the first section, as Helen has largely become happy. As Tolstoy writes, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” When Helen is struggling, there is real conflict in her life, which makes for a more interesting story to tell. Once she has achieved stability and happiness, however, the book moves quickly through those final decades.
Jensen obviously loves and admires her mother, and she wants this book to stand as a testament to the type of woman she was. King Ying wasn’t a hero or celebrity or anybody who normally has people writing books about her. However, she is somebody who worked diligently to overcome economic challenges, racial prejudice, and sexism to achieve a life where she found meaning and purpose. That’s a story worth telling and certainly worth hearing, perhaps now more than ever.
Kevin Brown is a high school English teacher, book reviewer, and freelance writer in Nashville, TN. He’s published three books of poetry, a memoir, and a scholarly work. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter at @kevinbrownwrite or on his website.