Water is fluid, soft, yielding. But water will wear away rock…what is soft is strong.

Lao Tzu

The Sibylline Press edition of The Strength of Water, An Asian American Coming of Age Memoir, is here! It is available for review on NetGalley and Booksprout. Order on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever books are sold online.

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In 1920s Detroit, King Ying stands on a box to iron clothes in her parents’ laundry business, endures taunts of Ching-Ching Chinaman on the playground, and tries to reconcile what passes for normal in Jazz-Age America with her father’s vastly different cultural values.

She dreams of a home, the elegance of her Jane Arden paper dolls, and winning her stern father’s affection. But when Ba incurs steep debts during the Great Depression, he sends her far from hope to his ancestral village.

In remote Tai Ting Pong, in the Guangdong Province of China, she feels as foreign in the land of her heritage as in the country of her birth. She must survive hunger, dangerous superstitions, and Japanese invasion as the Sino-Japanese War begins.

When guardian angels help her return to the U.S., it’s a chance to seize her American dream.

In this inspiring and heartfelt memoir, Karin K. Jensen records her mother’s transpacific quest for identity, survival, and new world dreams. The Strength of Water received a coveted starred Kirkus review and was included on Kirkus’s annual list of Top 100 Indie Books.

Book club discussion questions are included at the end of the book. Invite the author to your book club discussion!

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A classic, vividly written immigrant saga.

Kirkus Reviews

Some stories cry out to be told. Karin Jensen’s debut memoir, The Strength of Water, is such a story. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the sociology of early 20th-century China or the experience of Chinese immigrants. Ms. Jensen tells her story with clarity, wit, and a deft touch for the unvarnished truth

Tani Hanes, Author of Obachan, A Young Girl’s Struggle for Freedom in 20th Century Japan

From the Author

The Strength of Water is my mother’s memoir, as told to me, starting in the 1920s and spanning nearly a century. It offers exquisite period details of immigrant life in the U.S. and village life in China.

One woman’s epic odyssey, one family’s story of striving in a foreign country, one generation’s unique memory. An amazing memoir where the “strength of water,” the power of resilience and adapting to any circumstance, is the common thread that flows through the whole family, connecting everyone’s lives. Touching, inspiring, and brilliantly written.

Shen Yang, Author of More Than One Child

Throughout my childhood, my mother told stories of growing up in her father’s Detroit laundry business during the infancy of the automobile industry and later in a Cantonese village on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war. She also spoke of what it was like to survive as a live-in domestic worker and teen waitress in mid-century California.

The Strength of Water is a daughter’s careful excavation of her mother’s story; it is a mother’s disclosure of history, of trauma, of realities that mark not only her life but the legacy of her daughters’. This is a book written with tremendous love and authenticity. It is an important document of the Asian American experience.

Kao Kalia Yang, Award winning author of The Song Poet and The Latehomecomer

These stories felt like mythology, far removed from my experiences growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, yet vital to preserve as history. When I decided to set them down, I could hear my mother’s voice so clearly that I wrote in the first person. Thank you for taking a look.

The Strength of Water is a heartening read about an immigrant daughter’s odyssey. Through her mother’s stories and family oral histories, Karin Jensen successfully provides us with a moving glimpse of Chinese American life in the last century, revealing the humanity of immigrant laborers, how they lived, and what they felt.

Harvey Dong, Lecturer, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley

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