Jamie Ford
© ERIC HEIDLE

History repeating

With multiple timelines and points of view, Jamie Ford’s new novel explores inherited trauma

by JUDI KETTELER

Bestselling author Jamie Ford says he “always wanted to write three Seattle books.” His family—Chinese on his father’s side—has roots there, and Ford spent many of his formative years in the rainy city. Ford accomplished his goal with his first three novels, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Songs of Willow Frost and Love and Other Consolation Prizes, all of which tell poignant coming-of-age stories. “Then I was ready to kick the training wheels off,” says Ford, a Costco member.

With his next book, he wanted to look farther a field than Seattle. He also sought to combine historical fiction with speculative fiction (fiction that uses supernatural or futuristic elements). He started multiple stories, the first about Afong Moy, who, in 1834, was the first Chinese woman known to come to the United States. She became famous as a kind of carnival attraction people paid to see, before completely disappearing from the public eye. Another story was about the bubonic plague epidemic that ravaged San Francisco in the early 1900s, and how Chinese Americans were blamed. And yet another was about the Summerhill School in England, which started as an alternative high school in 1921. Ford started and stopped on each, always feeling like something was missing.

In the middle of all of that, he had been researching inherited trauma and epigenetic, or how the things that happen to you can change your genes, which you pass down to future generations. He went to a writers’ residency in Chicago, intending to work on another project, but got to talking with a fellow writer about his frustration with these threads of stories and his growing obsession with epigenetics. The colleague encouraged him to clear his mind and go back to the stories again. “That’s when I realized the characters in all these stories were really the same person,” Ford tells the Connection from his home in Montana.

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy pulls the threads together and weaves them across two centuries. The novel not only portrays how inherited trauma can live in multiple generations, it also explores whether there is a way for descendants to ever resolve it. As the novel opens, the reader is dropped in the middle, with Faye’s story, set in 1942. Faye Moy is descended from Lai King Moy, who is descended from Afong Moy. Descending from Faye is Zoe, and then Greta and finally Dorothy, whose story is set in 2045.

Ford leaves breadcrumbs in each story, as the narrative circles back and jumps ahead. It feels like vintage Ford, because so much of his work involves reclaiming pieces of lost Chinese American history. But the plot is far more complex than his other novels. “It felt like it broke my brain at times to plot this book,” Ford says.

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy is timely, given the current cultural conversations about inherited trauma and the importance of bringing hidden history to light. “I hope my books exercise readers’ empathy muscles,” Ford says. “We are a collection of prior generations’ mistakes, and the good and bad things that have happened to them.” It doesn’t excuse anything in the present, he adds, but if you know what happened, you can learn from it and maybe avoid repeating it.

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