Sundress Reads: Review of Melody Gee’s “We Carry Smoke and Paper”

Gee follows a trail of breadcrumb memories back through her adolescence and into her childhood, arriving at an explanation for her conversion to Catholicism in adulthood. With the precision of an academic historian, Gee sifts through her past as she contemplates where her pull to the divine originated:

“It’s hard not to wonder if there was a single moment that set me on my way to becoming a person of faith. This calling surprised me with its suddenness and vigor, and then with how quickly it became an anchor in our lives…My conversion, which was always a process and never a point in time, felt new and familiar, an aspiring toward a more expansive self, but one I ultimately recognized.” (Gee 50)

This “ultimate recognition” of a new aspect of the self becomes a North Star in Gee’s journey through Catholic conversion. 

So, too, does the Church community that she names as the main reason she stays in her parish, despite the long and bureaucratic road to official conversion. The people in her church validate a long-overlooked part of herself: “Perhaps I finally recognized my spirituality once I could see it in others, in the same way I recognize myself in the features and gestures of my daughters” (Gee 71). This observation is one of many moments in this collection linking Gee’s conversion process to an exploration of family and what we pass down to our children. As an adoptee from Taiwan, Gee felt constant pressure from her Cantonese parents to show her gratitude by erasing her own desires – especially any related to learning about her birth family. Instead, she attempted to piece together her identity through the heritage her parents relayed to her inconsistently, in scraps of “smoke” and “paper”.

Torn between a desire for her child to assimilate seamlessly into America and a need to keep Chinese traditions alive, Gee’s mother served as the curator of a new kind of family history. Gee detailed her tenuous position:

“My mom is Chinese until she is not. She must do figures in her head in Cantonese; she must eat rice with every meal, fearfully appease ancestors, and call my husband American, but never herself and never me. Until she visits China after forty-five years of living in America and is told that her clothes and hair and speech and posture are all unmistakably foreign. Until she is interviewed by an adoption agency and must, against all her Chinese sensibilities, express her longing for a child.” (Gee 55)

Gee’s writing shines in these heartwrenching remembrances of her parents. She later describes one of her mother’s favorite stories: of how, during the famine caused by the Cultural Revolution in China, her mother (around age 10 at the time) cried when she had no fish to eat for dinner. Gee’s grandmother threatened to leave the home, and Gee’s mother promised to never complain again. Gee describes how her mother, re-traumatized, told this story compulsively and frenetically, in a “flood” through which a young Gee held steady. Gee inherited her mother’s trauma, internalizing as a child that “good mothers threatened their children…to keep their daughters from wanting what they cannot have” (Gee 123). Gee reckons with the lofty expectations placed upon her from a young age through her parents also wanting what they could not have: a biological child that they tried to conceive in vain for over a decade. She “…sometimes imagine[s] [her] parents sitting down to a meal they have waited fourteen years for, starved beyond hunger and unable to believe their agony will finally end” (Gee 156). Emotional and physical hunger are evocatively rendered across time and space – from the liturgies of takeout from her grandfather’s restaurant to the stress associated with feeding an entire extended family. Unmet hunger as a representation of generational immigrant trauma is one of the most memorable, and powerful, motifs of this collection.

As an adult, Gee makes sense of the trauma in a monumental loss of culture, an enormous grief of immigration, through the language of Catholicism. Specifically, the ritual of initiation welcomes one’s new self into the Catholic church, honoring the struggles of separating from what is familiar in order to return with a deeper knowledge of the self (Michael Meade; Gee 99). She writes: “My family’s immigration is a kind of incomplete initiation—unending separation compounded with the absence of a society to return to” (Gee 99). In translating her family’s generational trauma into a newly intelligible language, Gee guides the reader through her parallel journeys of healing and conversion.

I was, and am, stunned by the tenderness Gee writes with, and holds for those who have hurt her. We Carry Smoke and Paper invites us to look more closely at the ashes we have been handed, thank those who placed them in our palms, and decide, ultimately, what we would like to keep.

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Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.