Digging to America by Anne Tyler

I had just mentioned this book in one of my previous postsand then I stumbled upon this book last Friday at Artbridge, a tiny bookstore annex cafe in Yerevan which has a small collection of English books, mostly hardcover (so expensive), but is your best bet in Yerevan to find recent books. Which is pretty sad, as Artbridge is so small. I have said this many times before (but never on this blog, so that’s a legit reason to say it one more time ), but the one thing that I really-really-really miss in Armenia is a bookstore with a good selection of English books. Apart from Digging to America I picked up A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini as well. You kind of have to buy the books you want when you see them at Artbridge, because once they’re gone, they might not come back. The nice thing is that they always bring in different books, but the downside is that when they have a book you want, you’d better buy it. Well, downside… It is a good excuse to buy books after all.

After a week of leaving the house at eight in the morning and not getting back before ten in the evening (the one time I did get back at eight, I was asleep on the couch by 8:30), Saturday was finally a day off for me. I picked up Digging to America in the morning and finished it before the afternoon was over. I enjoyed the book a lot. It was exactly right for its purpose: a relaxing and interesting read, that kept me hooked till the end.

The story begins when two families are waiting at the airport for their adopted baby-girls who are arriving from Korea. One family, Bitsy and Brad Donaldson, is very boisterous, loud and about as American as you can get, the other, Ziba and Sami Yazdan are an Iranian-American couple. The two families become friends and their lives become more and more intertwined over the years. The Donaldsons try to raise their daughter with respect for her Korean heritage, keeping her Korean name, having her wear Korean costumes on her birthday. The Yazdans on the other hand try to raise their daughter as an American girl, giving her an English name. They want their daughter to “fit in”, just as they themselves have always been trying to fit in the American society and trying to forget about their “otherness”, despite keeping Iranian traditions alive in the relations with their relatives and despite having lived in the US for decades.

The most interesting parts for me were the parts from the perspective of the Iranian couple and the husband’s mother Maryam, their efforts to fit in, Maryam’s questioning her own values and her independence. The life of immigrants to the US and the issue of fitting in is one that comes back in another book I recently read – Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian, which I will write about when I finish my review of it. Apart from that, my own situation is similar: I am also living in a country and a culture that is not my own and having to decide how much I want to fit in and how much I want to keep my “otherness”.

I felt mostly drawn to the characters of Sami’s mother Maryam, a widow for whom her independence and her “otherness” and her own privacy are very important. She doesn’t like to be drawn into others’ lives and events too much. I could relate to her need for privacy, her independence, and her feeling of “being different”. I also liked Connie, Bitsy’s mother who dies of cancer during the book, for the way she handles her disease. Bitsy Donaldson kind of irritated me throughout the book with her I-know-it-best attitude. And her name kept reminding me of Bitchy, even though she was not really bitchy, despite being rather annoying.

The book changes perspective in every chapter, alternating between the Donaldson family and the Yazdans. This worked well for me except for the one chapter told from the perspective of Jin-Ho, the daughter of the Donaldsons. I found that chapter kind of “the odd one out”. All of sudden Bitsy and Brad were referred to as “Jin-Ho’s mother” and “Jin-Ho’s father” and there were other things that irritated me slightly in this chapte.

All in all, a very good book to read on a rainy Sunday afternoon or when you have an evening to yourself.