Inside the Untold Struggles and Triumphs of Carol Lin: A Memoir That Reveals the True Cost of Breaking News
L.L.: Your mother is a tertiary character in When News Breaks, but a pivotal one. There’s a section early on when you talk about her immigration to the U.S. when she was in college, “Quickly, you’re leaving tonight,” your grandmother told her. I really became connected to your mom. Can you take us into that moment, and tell us a little more about how she shaped the narrative?
C.L.: This is the scene where the breaking news of my mom’s Chinese homeland falling to the Communists sparked her perilous journey to the United States to marry my father, an older academic she had been promised to when she was only sixteen. Now, 22 years old, standing at her garden gate in southern China, she is saying goodbye to her mother, my grandmother, who presses a delicate bracelet of ten jade pieces into her hands.
