“Paisley Rekdal has taken that universal question—Who am I?—and added to it another dimension: What am I? She has looked in the mirror, as well as the world around her, to examine issues of identity, ethnicity, culture, and race. No polemics here, just observations and experiences of the most personal kind. And she’s funny too!”
—Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family
“Makes us feel and see the complicated and violent nature of the issue of race and identity. Rekdal writes with eloquence, liveliness, and poignancy—a truly impressive achievement.”
—Ha Jin, author of Waiting
“She is the sort of observer we should all wish for: disarming, frank, and intelligent. In setting out to explore three realms—China, Japan, and Korea—she ends up learning much more about another one: herself.”
—Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha
“Insightful and idiosyncratic…. Rekdal’s essays are so engaging that it takes while to realize how much they reveal about the delicate, shifting balance between the ways others perceive us and how we choose to define ourselves.”–Us Weekly
“An engaging and artful memoir…poetic not in its diction but in it elisions, in the spaces she allows between thoughts.”–The New York Times Book Review
“Compelling, appealing, cinematic. . . With this entire collection, Rekdal refreshes the meaning and the image of being displaced in this world.” — The Boston Globe
“Remarkable. . .A keenly intelligent, restless witness to her mixed-race life, Rekdal is a writer with a deep and urgent story to tell.” — Newsday
“An engaging and artful memoir. . .poetic not in its diction but in it elisions, in the spaces she allows between thoughts.” — The New York Times Book Review
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