In Merrill's coming-of-age memoir, she explains her unlikely--and tumultuous--journey from Taiwan to Utah. Merrill was raised in Taiwan in a traditional Buddhist household; her father, an electrical engineer, always had the final say and openly admitted to hating his daughters. Her mother was inattentive and cruel, often neglecting Merrill and a younger sister. When she was a teenager, Merrill's family welcomed a pair of strange visitors into their lives--White Latter-day Saint missionaries from America who told odd stories. These stories resonated with Merrill but not so much with the rest of her combative family. A few years later, she broke from her family's religion and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After her mission, Merrill met Cameron Chastain, an American Latter-day Saint missionary in Taipei who spoke some Chinese. Merrill knew from first sight that he would be her husband, and she was right...for a little while. The couple relocated to Cameron's hometown of Edinburg, Texas, and things quickly went south. The Chastain family--Cameron included--proved to have just as many problems as the one Merrill left behind. When the marriage soon fell apart, she was stranded in America with a poor grasp of the English language and few friends. Would she find a way to make it work in this foreign land? Merrill's writing is precise and often quite funny, as here, when she recounts how her father forced the missionaries to tell Merrill and her sister that their parents were getting divorced. The girls just shrugged, but the missionaries burst into tears: "I had never seen any grown men cry before. The Elders, tall as oak trees, sobbed like small children, their high-pitched cry a sewing machine running at full speed. Were their tears speech? Should I speak with weeping too? I didn't know what to say." The reader can't help but hang onto her every word as Merrill explores issues of faith, trauma, mental illness, immigration, and relationships. It's a strange story to be sure--one perhaps more in keeping with Buddhism's tenet that "life is a sea of suffering" than the Latter-day Saints' teachings of God's infinite love--but a captivating one. A surprising but compelling memoir of resilience and family.
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