Review of The Strength of Water by Karin K. Jensen

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

When it comes to blogging, or even watching movies and whatnot, I’ve been in such a weird headspace lately. I started a new job after quite a bit of a spell of not having any besides freelance and contract work, and now that I am actually working, I’m not watching as much as I used. I also have not been reading as much.

I could blame the new job, but when I come home I have a lot of free time and find myself not picking up the things I loved so much before. Maybe because the cold season is approaching I’m starting to get really into the feels

I have a lot of advance copies to read, but haven’t been getting through them as quickly either. But when the email for The Strength of Water and the opportunity for an advance copy appear, I was intrigued by the memoir’s concept. I didn’t realize at first, despite reading this fact, that it was about the author’s mother until I was knee deep into the book already and put the pieces together. That made it more powerful to me—but we’ll get more into that later.

Anyways, I broke this book in half when reading it so I could space out my reading time over two days, but if I had more time and the motivation lately, I could see myself reading this in one sitting.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to keep going on and on in the introduction.

The story of Jensen’s mother, who grew up in both the United States and China during the early 1900s.

This memoir tells the story of Karin K. Jensen’s mother, Helen, who was quite the remarkable woman. We hear the story of her life through her perspective, including how her family ended up originally in Detroit during the 1920s. Her mother passes away after having a handful of girls and a single son, and her father, who was running the laundry business, decided it was time to go back to China and find a new wife.

So they left everything behind, despite Helen and her sisters having started school in the States and learning a decent amount of English. They go to their village near Hong Kong, where their father finds a new wife in Seam, then he leaves his kids behind because he can’t afford to take everyone back to the US with him.

Life in China is a bit of an adjust, but Helen and her siblings learn to live in the village. It’s unlike what they experienced before in the United States, but their life back in North America eventually begins to feel like a dream. As the beginning of World War II approaches, though, life in the village gets very tough.

Helen, who is starving and faces health issues because of her lack of nutrition, is sent for by her father, kickstarting her life back in the States. In China we see how her sisters and she are the outsiders originally because they wore funny American clothes and had different experiences, but as she returned to the United States, we see how she was in-between worlds again.

What struck me though was how determined she was to keep surviving. As a teenager she came back to the US and began working as a waitress and odd jobs in order to survive and help bring the rest of her family back to the US. The narratives we often get about Asian Americans in general during this period are male dominated, so to see her perspective is refreshing.

I am somewhat familiar with the dynamics of San Francisco during this time, but not enough to say I’m confident in the historical basis of what was going on at that time. I found this to be a great primer for learning more about the area during this period, especially because it was written by a woman about a woman she intimately knew.

Women’s stories often get buried, so this was an excellent excavation and preservation of this one woman’s story for sure.

Overall Thoughts

I put off on reading this book for a bit after my physical copy had arrived, but I’m really glad I had the chance to sit down and actually get through the book at my own pace. I don’t know if I would have read it any time soon if I hadn’t done that, like some of the other advance copies I’m sitting on, but I have no regrets.

Anyways, this is clearly written and a smooth read overall. Some of the chapters are really short, others less so. I found it quite accessible even if you weren’t entirely familiar with the history and the racism going on during that period, but in other ways I was learning a lot from her mother’s experiences in both countries.

I don’t know if I’ll be returning to this soon in the near future, but I could see myself coming back to it with time. With that, I say go pick up a copy from your local bookstore or library if you get the chance! You might love this one or find it very valuable to read.

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