We Carry Smoke and Paper

“A brilliant exploration of loss, language, adoption, silence, hunger, and belonging. Reading Melody Gee’s essays is like gathering together for a meal. In her grandparents’ Cantonese restaurant in Bellflower, the scent of salt cured fish, bitter melon, and ginger lingers. Her mother dabs White Flower oil on her aching muscles; Uncle Terry’s radio that only picks up AM stations hums on the counter. ‘The restaurant was my first liturgy,’ Gee writes. She explores loss: the loss of Taiwanese Mandarin, her earliest language; ‘the silence period’ after learning a new language; the loss of her grandparents; the loss of her family’s restaurant. But alongside these losses, Gee searches for belonging and the sacred. To read these essays is to consider silence and language anew.”—Julia Koets, author, The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays

“Melody Gee shows us how languages make and remake our worlds, and in We Carry Smoke and Paper, Gee leads us into a world startling in its luminosity, a space glowing with desire for holy belonging. In refusing to turn away from painful separations, she finds transcendence in the ordinary intimacies of life. In reading this book, we do too. How grateful I am to have read these words and seen this world.”—Maddie Norris, author, The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays