Uprooted by Ruth Chan

Uprooted is a memoir about going back to your family's country of origin. 

It is the summer of 1993 and Ruth Chan is spending one last day with her best friends at Canada's Wonderland. In two days, she will be leaving Canada behind and moving with her parents to Hong Kong. Ruth and her friends promise to write each other. Almost all of Ruth's mother's family live in Hong Kong. Ruth visited the city when she was five years old and doesn't have pleasant memories. 

After spending the next day packing up her room, they drop her older brother, Goh  off at his boarding school. With only one year left, it makes sense for him to stay in Canada. On their last night at home, Ruth and her dad have their last "talk-to-talk" in Canada. He wants to tell her about how he came to be born in a barn. It is a story her father's older sister has told many times before. Her father stops his telling despite Ruth wanting him to continue. He tells her that when they continue the story, they will be in Hong Kong. He reminds Ruth that "The unknown is simply a part of life."

After a fifteen hour flight, Ruth and her parents arrive in Hong Kong. Ruth notices everyone looks like her, speaks Cantonese and that it is crowded with long lines for everything. Their new home is an apartment on the fifteenth floor of a high rise. After several days of unpacking and organizing her new bedroom, on day seven, Ruth and her parents go to visit her mother's family. Ruth is overwhelmed at the family gathering. The understands Cantonese but isn't fluent in it. And some of the Chinese customs and values she doesn't know. Ruth feels like she doesn't fit in and hides in the kitchen with the cat.

Ruth's father leaves for his work in China and Ruth starts classes at the German Swiss International School. On her first day she makes a new friend, Bonnie who is from Hong Kong but has been living in Australia for the past three years. But as the days go by, Ruth finds adapting to a different culture and settling into life in Hong Kong is far more challenging than she anticipated.

Discussion

Uprooted is based on Ruth Chan's own experience when her family returned to Hong Kong. She was thirteen years old and had lived in Toronto.  The move meant leaving behind everything familiar and stepping into the unknown. 

Ruth Chan's parents came to Canada to attend university and then stayed. They returned to Hong Kong when she was thirteen-years-old. She attended Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts after graduating from high school in Beijing, China. There she studied a double major in developmental psychology and studio art. Chan also completed the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Education School. This led her into a temporary career, teaching art to school children in Boston's Chinatown and also in Washington, D.C. Eventually she came to realize teaching was not really the career she wanted and she gradually moved into studio art, illustrating children's books. This led to Chan creating her first graphic novel, Uprooted.  

Uprooted is not just about Ruth's own experience in moving back to Hong Kong but also tells a story within her personal story, that of her father and his family fleeing during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This story has been repeatedly told by grandparents and aunts and Ruth knows it well.  The two stories carry the common theme, that of being uprooted from everything familiar and having to meet new challenges in a new place. Ruth Chan like her grandmother, had been uprooted from everything familiar. Chan weaves these two stories together by having Ruth's father tell her about his family during their sporadic "talk-to-talk" sessions at bedtime, as they leave Toronto and are beginning life in Hong Kong. 

When her father first begins his retelling on their last night in Toronto, Ruth tells him "I know the story, but it feels different when you're telling it this time. Like it's more real or something." In fact it does seem more real to Ruth because she's living leaving her home and going somewhere very different, just as her grandparents did when they left their village and fled into the mountains. 

When Ruth's father's family arrives in the village of Pong Fa, they struggle to find a place to stay. As they find refuge in a barn with a full pigsty, Ruth's grandparents tell their children to be patient, that  "...soon they will find where they belong." Previously, Ruth's grandparents and their family would have found this very uncomfortable, but they were able to find the good in their situation, enjoying the pigs. It is a message for Ruth that she too will find her place and that there are good things in Hong Kong.

In another "Talk-to-Talk", Ruth's father describes how after he was born two months premature, he struggled to live. With not enough food, Ruth's grandmother couldn't nurse him and she was told to let her son die. But her grandmother refused, courageously persevering in feeding him. That baby grew up to be Ruth's father and he now tells Ruth it was his mother courage, perseverance and patience that saved him. These are qualities he recognizes in Ruth.

When Ruth's grandfather chased off bandits determined to steal from his family, Ruth's father tells her he did this despite being very ill. Ruth feels  this was "gutsy", a trait her father tells her she also has. Her father's story of his family's struggle in a new place helps Ruth understand that she's not the first one to experience the feeling of struggling to belong and that it takes courage, perseverance and patience to gradually feel welcome in a new place.

In telling these two stories, Ruth was able "to honor the incredible strength that my Mah Mah, my aunt, and my parents possessed in overcoming all the things that came their way..." and to recognize how her own challenges made her grow into the person she is today. 

In Hong Kong, Ruth encounters unexpected bias in her new home: "...all of a sudden, in Hong Kong, I wasn't 'Chinese' enough because I didn't speak Cantonese well and dressed differently..." She feels "...lonely in a new place, like no one understood me or seemed to care about how I was doing." Ruth feels that both her parents are distracted and unaware of her struggles: her father is working China most of the time, and her mother seems absorbed with reconnecting with her family and friends. However, when Ruth does finally tell her parents that she feels lost, they point out to her all the ways she has changed and grown. Ruth herself comes to realize that she's learning new skills, like becoming more fluent in Cantonese, making new friends such as Bonnie, and more independent as she learns to find her way around Hong Kong.  In fact, she's doing so well that when her older brother, Goh visits for Christmas, she is able to take him around the city just like a local.

Uprooted is a engaging, realistic story about what it's like to move to a new place to live and that it can take courage, perseverance and patience to find where you belong.

Book Details:

Uprooted. A memoir about what happens when your family moves back. by Ruth Chan
New York: Roaring Brook Press 

285 pp.