Joan Burbick
Redbat Books: 2024
The narrator of this spellbinding, fictional memoir obsessively researches her husband’s past in hopes of uncovering the truth about her mother-in-law, a woman she’s never met, a woman who disappeared in the war. Joan Burbick unravels the mystery over the course of three decades, pulling one thread at a time.
A dress. A painted portrait. A packet of handwritten letters written a long time ago. An envelope of 11 small images, the first photos found in more than half a century. A name. More letters, this collection kept not by an acquaintance but preserved by a private library. An email. A date. A newspaper article.
Erased details the journey of discovering what really happened to Katherine Lin, a promising Chinese scientist who gave birth to her only child while studying in America. For most of his life, the only information he had about her came from his birth certificate: her name and her race, which was recorded as “yellow” in Boston in 1939.
“For thirty years, I couldn’t tell the difference between summoning the ghost of Katherine and Katherine summoning me. I was suspended in that dangerous liminal territory, living a double life, searching the past for traces of my mother-in-law’s life, and trying to live my life in the present with her son,” the Spokane-based Burbick, a retired Washington State University professor of English and American studies, writes in this quest for identity and truth. It’s her second novel.
The story unfolds at the couple’s Washington state island home and travels to and from China over extended periods of time. While it’s mostly told through the perspective of a Polish American scholar in modern times, the narrative interweaves chapters of Katherine’s voice from China during the Japanese occupation in the 1940s. The prologue comes from her husband, who notes his mother, who vanished when he was a young boy, “existed in a world apart, a parallel world running next to mine.”
Reclaiming her life reveals a staggering scope of deceit, purported by his father and his family. “We are born into a web of stories refined, erased, repeated, denied, and embellished,” Burbick writes.
Erased fills the shadowy void of absence and unknowing, and avenges family treachery as both an act of defiance and ultimate labor of love. It’s a gift.