Unraveling Threads: Essays on Inheritance (The Journal Non/Fiction Prize) - Softcover

Lin, Brenda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081425988X ISBN 13: 9780814259887

Publisher: Mad Creek Books, 2026

Synopsis

A memoir-in-essays that, in its exploration of language, family ties, and Taiwanese history, distills how the handmade holds memory, inheritance, and the work of caretaking.

“Tactile memory feels like it is the easiest to lose,” brenda Lin writes in Unraveling Threads. But in these exquisite essays, she demonstrates just how the tactile bolsters personal, familial, and cultural memory. From the remnant of a baby’s umbilical cord to the antique hand-embroidered baby carriers her mother collects, Lin shows us how the tactile and handmade connect parents and children, homeland and diaspora, and give texture to caregiving’s many forms. As Lin writes, the radical for thread forms the basis of Chinese characters for women’s work, for practice through repetition, for inheritance. Threads form the mesh in the stent that keeps her father’s heart working. And yuan, the red thread of fate, is the first word she translated for her future husband. When Lin returns to Taiwan after decades away, this time with her young family, the threads of creativity and caretaking become the warp and weft of the continual process of homecoming. These essays on motherhood, language, art, and diaspora will resonate with anyone who has experienced the process of returning to, or building, a home.

About this title

About the Author

brenda Lin is a writer, literary translator, and educator based in Taipei, Taiwan. She is the author of Wealth Ribbon: Taiwan Bound, America Bound. Her writing and translations have appeared in Fourth Genre, Asymptote, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A friend who was newly pregnant had told me that she could feel an actual burrowing in her pelvis. When I became pregnant with our first child, I imagined there was a muffled tapping coming from inside my uterus, like a tiny person was knocking on a tiny little door in a tiny underground house.

I had been an incongruently tall child, the same height as many grown women in Taiwan (five feet) and two whole heads taller than most other kids by the time I was nine years old. While my preadolescent peers were willowy and thin, or sinewy and athletic, I was already soft and curvy. My size and shape felt embarrassing because the timing was so premature. I stopped growing one year later, so eventually everyone around me caught up, then towered over me, the result being that I’d always felt I inhabited an anachronistic body. But pregnancy allowed me to reclaim all the ways my body had once betrayed me. I observed the physical changes―rounded belly, swollen breasts, strengthened legs to support my new weight―with welcome curiosity. Tracking the size of the growing baby, which most pregnancy websites compared to different foods―a poppy seed, a lentil, a blueberry, a fig, then a peach, a sweet potato, a grapefruit, a pumpkin, and finally, a watermelon―made me feel of this earth, like I was rooted and was growing, sprouting from humus, and that I belonged exactly in this body, where my baby fruit was planted inside.

When I was six months pregnant, we traveled to San Francisco for a cousin’s wedding. It happened to be my thirtieth birthday, so a few nights before the wedding, my family made plans to gather at the pizza place where we used to go when my mother, brother, and I lived in the Bay Area. We had lived there for four years―along with most of our extended family―while my father was setting up his business in Taiwan.

Before our pizza dinner, my mother presented me with a birthday gift, which was a very odd gesture, because we didn’t grow up with the habit of birthday gift giving. At six months, the baby was the size of a large grapefruit. I felt the grapefruit shift, push up against the walls of its house, as if the baby were trying to reach for this gift. My mother handed me an old US passport. The words Bicentennial 1776–1976 were embossed on the cover. I opened it to the first page and found a picture of a newborn baby with its swollen eyes sealed shut, being held up by a man wearing a maroon sweater with the name ERIC in cream lettering on one sleeve. The man’s face and legs were cut off so that the focus was on the baby. I recognized the sweater; it was my father’s, a sweater my mother had knit for him when they were in graduate school. I didn’t recognize myself. I fingered my typewritten name and birth date, as though they were Braille. Then, something fell from the pages of the passport: a small, yellowed envelope. I shook out its contents into the palm of my hand.

“It’s your umbilical cord,” my mother told me.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mad Creek Books
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081425988X
• ISBN 13: 9780814259887
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208