By Adela Wu
In Unraveling Threads: Essays on Inheritance, a memoir-in-essays that won The Journal Non/Fiction Prize, brenda Lin has woven a shimmering work that examines the roots of family, language, and art.
Lin is a writer and translator of Taiwanese heritage. English, the language in which she writes, is her second language. This special volume showcases her attention to detail and theme in hybrid essays that blend personal narrative, research and reflections on culture and history, and photographs of anthropological artifacts. The reader will notice that there is even a common thread evident throughout the Contents, as each essay is titled in both English and Chinese, building on one another in exploring acts of creation and collection.
As I’ve been reconnecting with my Chinese and Taiwanese culture in adulthood, I found myself particularly fascinated by Lin’s deft meditations on Chinese language “radicals”—denoting the root meaning of a word—and “characters”—that which deepens the word’s meaning. I learned that the traditional Chinese character for “to inherit”—繼—is composed of five radicals for “knot/thread”—糸—and that the Chinese word for “fated affinity” is 缘, another character that builds on the radical for knot/thread, reminiscent of the popular concept of the red thread of destiny. The chapter, “On Characters with the Radical 糸”, is a glossary of additional terms that branch from this radical for knot/thread; it is also a tender series of vignettes about the author and her mother.
In fact, the strongest sections in the book are about Lin’s mother and her own reflections on motherhood, inheritance, and legacy, even though she does write about other family members. Her mother collects textiles and anthropological relics like baby carriers, clothes, and shoes from various countries. At first, Lin regards material things as inferior to incorporeal ideas, thoughts, and dreams. Yet, she acknowledges that, over time, “things matter. Things are matter. …Recalling Anni Albers—‘We touch the objects of our love. We touch the objects we form.”’ There are several lovely essays that circle and develop this idea of tactile care and love.
Even on my second reading of Unraveling Threads, I was still discovering fresh insights. In the essay “On Containers and Containment,” Lin cites Ursula Le Guin: “the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. Things hold meanings.” In much the same way, Unraveling Threads is itself a magical bag, containing braided threads of meaning that will entrance readers.
Adela Wu, MD, is a second-generation Chinese-Taiwanese American writer and surgeon. She has published science writing for NPR through the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship and for ABC News. Her creative nonfiction appears in TaiwaneseAmerican.org and Stanford Medicine Magazine. She has won national recognition for essay writing, including Gold in the 2025 Robert G. Fenley Writing Awards and Honorable Mention in the 2026 Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prizes. Her work has been supported by VONA, the Seventh Wave, and AWP. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir about culture, family, and illness