I’m not sure how commonplace parental deathbed wishes and wills with conditional clauses are in day-to-day life, but the pressure to repair relationships with siblings when a parent is dying is an experience I’m familiar with. Winnie M Li’s novel What We Left Unsaid captures it perfectly.
Three adult (and largely estranged) siblings dotted across the globe are forced together to finish a road trip halted by a violent incident decades ago. Alex, Bonnie and Kevin were once passengers with their Taiwanese immigrant parents on a family expedition from California to the Grand Canyon, but never reached their destination. Under layers of shame and confusion, the trip was never spoken of again. Now, 30 years later, after their mother suffers a stroke, she asks that her children reunite, drive to the Grand Canyon and then visit her on her deathbed, together.
Alex, the baby sister, lives in London and is married to a Black woman whom her family has never met, nor do they know the couple are expecting. Kevin is the frustrated, homophobic middle child who is resentful of seemingly everything while he’s stuck in cycles of middle-class boredom. Bonnie, the oldest child, is married to the American dream – or rather into old money, existing in a rarefied world that most of us only see on TV. As first-generation Taiwanese kids, their experience tells us a lot about how trauma and hate are ingested in all areas of life and parenting.
Li, as Bonnie, can explain it better than I. “Mom and Dad would be heartbroken to learn you can lose your heritage that quickly, within the space of a generation. Their own Taiwanese dialect has vanished from her vocabulary, even though she once spoke it as a child, translating to Kevin and Alex, forming the bridge between her parents and siblings. She has now become the acceptable Asian wife and mom in an elite white dynasty.”
The novel struck a chord with me. It brought back memories of tacos and pink lemonade on the Navajo reservation in Arizona’s Painted Desert before arriving at the Grand Canyon on an epic road trip with my father, aunt and brother when I was six years old. There is an incredible picture of my dad, looking straight out of Miami Vice, with me in the back of an A-Team kitted-out van. We tracked our progress from Philadelphia to LA and back again while searching for every state’s licence plate to kill time.
On that trip, my father and I slept outside on rocks at Yosemite National Park and fell asleep looking at the stars. Forty years later, my relationship with my brother, however, is forever changed.
I have not, and will not, speak to him again. He is estranged from both sides of my extended family. Much like the siblings in What We Left Unsaid, we tried to reconcile when my mum was dying, ultimately to please her, but once she was gone, the impetus for civility vanished along with her.
With estranged siblings, no matter how much time has passed, those historic resentments and hurts are so easily surfaced and the ammunition to injure is so readily available. The volatility of that relationship can either be a great comfort or your most toxic relationship. Siblings can be the easiest people with whom to provoke unexplained laughter or throw punches. To put it another way, we know exactly how to twist the knife.
When my mum was dying, I tried to put on a brave face while sleeping in my childhood bedroom during leaves of absence from work to accompany her to chemotherapy. Despite my best intentions, I could not help but revert to a spoiled, pedantic 13-year-old. My destructive coping method involved downing copious amounts of white wine and slamming a lot of doors. My family never saw the capable and rational crisis comms adviser I presented to be to the rest of the world.
It’s no surprise that I’m most closely related to Alex in the book – the one who chased dreams, never stopped travelling and relocated to another country. I often joke that I didn’t end up 3,000 miles from my family by accident, that I intentionally put a huge distance between myself and my brother to create the woman I have become and the life I wanted to have. It is impossible to be the person that you usually are while being thrust back into the power dynamics that you escaped 30 years ago.
What We Left Unsaid’s universal relatability lies in the fact that we all want maternal approval. Bridging the widening gap (even the size of the Grand Canyon) between political viewpoints, bank balances, and lifestyles, becomes possible when coming to terms with shared memories and enemies. For Li’s characters, it may stick, but my own are another matter.
Jamie Klingler is co-founder of Reclaim These Streets and founder of the London Book Club
