Author Jean Kwok turns her own family tragedy into moving tale about love, loss and racism
- Kwok’s brother Kwan was killed in a 2009 plane crash, and she uses the pain of this experience for her poignant new book Searching for Sylvie Lee
- Beautifully written, it also focuses on the hard reality of being an immigrant and a woman in today’s world
Searching for Sylvie Lee, by Jean Kwok. Published by William Morrow. 4/5 stars
In 2009, Hong Kong-born Jean Kwok’s older brother, Kwan, disappeared. A physicist with a passion for flying, he was piloting a twin-engined plane from Texas to his home in Virginia one November day, and was never seen alive again.
After about a week of searching, Kwan Kwok’s body was found amid wreckage in the mountains of West Virginia. Jean Kwok has said that her brother’s death broke her family. “We are all still revolving around the vacuum that his loss created,” she wrote soon after the accident.
In a new book, Searching for Sylvie Lee, Kwok has taken the pain of that experience and turned it into a moving tale that, while billed as a mystery, transcends the genre. Set in the Netherlands, where Kwok – who emigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five years old – now lives, the novel borrows pieces from her life to tell a story about the devastating effects of family separation and how secrets damage and shape their victims.
The plot follows Sylvie, who at six months old was sent by her parents from New York to the Netherlands to live with her grandmother and her mother’s cousin, Helena Tan. When Sylvie was nine, her parents bring her back to the United States to live with them and Amy, the two-year-old sister she has never met. Sylvie never really adjusts.
At 32, Sylvie travels to the Netherlands to be with her dying grandmother. Before flying home, she disappears. Amy heads to Europe to search for Sylvie and does not trust the Tan family’s reactions.