Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor by Anna Qu, pub. Catapult Inked in typewriter font on Anna Qu’s forearm is the title of her debut memoir: Made in China. The tattoo came first, she says, and testifies to the deeply personal nature of this project for Qu. Ten years in the writing, Made in China is a skilful and emotive excavation of a traumatic childhood split between China and the United States. As well as playfully reclaiming an often pejorative tag, the title attests to a personal history that, she says via Zoom from New York, even those close to her don’t know well. Born in Wenzhou, on China’s southeastern coast, Qu, now 37, was left with grandparents as a small child when her widowed mother moved to the US to build a new existence. “I was the girl without parents; a father dead, a mother who left to start a new life,” she writes in the book. In America, her mother married a Taiwanese man, and eventually returned to China to reclaim her seven-year-old daughter. This was by no means a straightforwardly happy reunion, however. Her mother “had the familiarity of someone I once knew, but no longer felt close to”, she writes. After her arrival at the new family home, in Queens, New York, she was treated by both parents as inferior to her two new half siblings, Henry and Jill. Her initial experiences of family life in America are confusing, alienating, but it is during Qu’s teenage years that her mother’s neglect hardens into something far more malign. First, after a confrontation with her parents, she is suddenly sent back to China, by herself, to live with unknown acquaintances of her mother in Xian. When, after six traumatic months, her mother acquiesces and agrees to bring her back to America, she is sent, aged 15, to work in her parents’ sweatshop, putting in long hours trimming fabric – up to 50 hours a week – and having to catch the train home while her parents leave early by car. Eventually, after she reveals her situation to a school guidance counsellor, a call is made to child services. Much of the book deals with the aftermath, emotional and familial, of this devastating period. While such a synopsis of Made in China foregrounds the trauma of the memoir, the book itself is notable for a striking lack of moral certainty or judgment over her mother’s behaviour. “I’ve always understood why my mother was the way she was,” she says, “and she didn’t seem like an evil stepmother to me. I mean, she’s my biological mother. And I don’t have a father, so she was the only person I had.” She draws out a cultural distinction: “Her abandonment was in a lot of ways more cruel. The American perspective is that you try your best to make up for the missing parent. And from her perspective, it was more like: it sucks for you.” Her choice to dial down the authorial judgment was in the service of drawing out some of the wider themes of her experience. “I tried my best not to really harp on the resentment and really think about how to make the story larger,” she says. The book dispassionately interrogates the reasons behind her mother’s behaviour, and the nature of what constitutes abuse. “The cost of immigration is something that I really hope comes across in the book,” she says. Her mother, she believes, sacrificed her in the pursuit of a stable, prosperous life in America. “I want to say it’s shallow but it’s not, because there are so many generations of poverty.” Both her mother and grandmother, she notes, had lived through the devastating years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The books being published are still very, very white. Minority voices are just not being recognised as much. So, I would love to see it go big! Anna Qu on Made in China There is a well-worn cliché that writing down such personal stories is freeing; a form of catharsis. “If anyone tells you that writing a memoir is cathartic ...” she says, smiling and letting the thought trail off. “I mean maybe for the first hour! It was really, really tough. I’m glad that it’s finally going to make it into the world, but it was at no point easy.” The book ends on a hopeful note with the adult Anna reuniting with her grandmother. Her relationship with her mother, however, remains distant as the story concludes. Has there been any subsequent reconciliation? “My relationship with my family is as it was left off in the book,” she says. “I haven’t seen my mother for about nine years.” She pauses. “It’s a really tough relationship.” Will her mother read the book? “No. She doesn’t read in English much. She’s been in this country longer than I have, but she’s not fluent in English,” she says. “That’s what happens when you’re operating in Chinese your entire life.” The significance of seeing this story of three generations of women “made in China”, as the title has it, published and out in the world has special power for Qu. “I spent so much time on it, and I do want people to read it,” she says emphatically. Her ambitions are not just personal, however; these are stories, she notes, that are drastically under-represented in the mainstream. “In America, publishing is still so, so antiquated,” she says. “It’s still very, very white. The books being published are still very, very white. Minority voices are just not being recognised as much. So, I would love to see it go big!”