We carry smoke and paper : essays on the grief and hope of conversion / Melody S. Gee.

Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2024]

187 pages ; 22 cm

"Answering an unexpected call to faith in her thirties, Melody S. Gee contends with what saying 'yes' to conversion requires of an adopted daughter of Chinese immigrants, whose many hungers had defined her belonging and her daughterhood. Faced with a new framework for her place in the world, grief and doubt shadow her tentative steps toward becoming a believer. She looks for answers and consolation in her family's story of immigration trauma and cultural assimilation, in the ways their burdens and limitations made her seeking both impossible and inevitable. In essays that explore the parallels between conversion and language acquisition, isolated liturgies, cultural inheritances, stalled initiations, disrupted storytelling, and adoption, Gee examines conversion's grief and hope, losses and gains, hauntings and promises. We Carry Smoke and Paper is a memoir about what we owe to those who sacrifice everything for us, and it is about the many conversions in a lifetime that turn our heads via whispers and shouts, calling us to ourselves"-- Provided by publisher.

Online version: Gee, Melody S., 1981- We carry smoke and paper Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2024]

English

October 18, 2024

Includes bibliographical references.