Erased

A fictional memoir, Erased is about what happened to Katherine Lin, a wife, young mother, and promising Chinese scientist. Decades after Lin's disappearance in war-torn China, her daughter-in-law sets out on a trek to find out who she was, how she lived, and why her death was a mystery. Through family letters, unusual keepsakes, and discoveries in China, Lin comes alive. But this attempt to rescue Katherine Lin from oblivion uncovers some dangerous secrets long buried under the chaos of war, exile, and family treachery.

"Joan Burbick's Erased is a novel that revolves around intuition, research and love in a story that wants to know why the past matters. It is a compelling narrative, about an American woman who obsessively researches her Chinese-American husband's past to unravel the truth of his background, one that appears to be a construct of family secrets and lies. She endeavors to write a 'memoir' about his mother's life and death, set against the history of the relationship between China and America from World War Two to the present. The novel includes real photographs and documents and questions what is real and what is fiction and why truth matters. An engaging novel that speaks to our times. Recommend it."

"Joan Burbick's travels in Asia have led to her remarkable novel, Erased. A Polish-American woman is troubled by her Chinese-American husband's lack of knowledge about his mother. Her desire to find out about his mother leads her back in time, beginning in the 1940s, a period China saw cataclysmic changes during the Japanese invasion and its Civil War. In the end, the wife feels she is living a double life as she tries to live in the present with her husband. Erased is a compelling novel about identity."

For 27 years, Joan Burbick traveled frequently to China and Hong Kong, teaching and lecturing. Puzzled about her husband's Chinese family that had erased the life and death of his mother, she decided to understand why. She began her research with personal letters from his Chinese family and then continued by searching archives in Philadelphia, New Haven, and Boston. She stayed in places her mother-in-law would have lived or visited in the 1940s and immersed herself in the pathways of fleeing Chinese during the Japanese-occupation. She read histories of modern China and Shanghai wartime newspapers. Erased was based on these years of investigation. Previously, Joan Burbick published books on Henry David Thoreau, rodeo queens, gun culture in America, and national narratives in the United States. She landed in the world of fiction later in life. Stripland was her first novel; Erased, the second.

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