Pass the Tissue

It is difficult to know where to start with this book because there are so many intricately woven facets of it, both in terms of theme and writing technique as well as emotion.

I wanted to discuss the form in which The Language of Blood is written. While the short sections of the book initially seem to come randomly, certain subjects are returned to in a cycling effect: Umma’s letter at the beginning of the book is revisited on page 72, the story of the queen being cured by the tree on page 13 is referenced on page 162 during Jane’s month of taking care of her mother, and so on. There are multiple effects of this revisiting technique: it is mimetic of Jane’s fragmented memory as an adopted child, it is mimetic of Jane’s fragmented life as a Korean child adopted by an American family, it allows reflection of past events, and it also gives the sense of growth and connection between seemingly independent parts.

            Seemingly speaking directly to the form of her work, Trenka introduces the fifth section of her book by writing, “A quilt is the perfect thing to make. Scraps of pants, jackets, skirts – old useless abandoned things – transform” (103). Initially, Jane is preoccupied by the question of why her mother gave her up for adoption, and if she was really loved. As the book goes on and Jane meets Umma, her emotions towards her mother are transformed from feelings of painful neglect to love and belonging. Jane revisits this notion after having met and spent time with her mother: “I have made it my task to reconstruct the text of a family…to collect the overlooked, the debris…[w]ith these I will sew a new quilt of memory and imagination, each stitch a small transformation” (150). This cycle of the idea of creating something from nothing reveals Jane’s growth and inner transformation.

Though readers are shown the tragedy of Jane’s journey to meet her mother and Umma’s subsequent sickness on page 162, they are rewarded with a fuller understanding of the passages on pages 13-15. Revelation 2:17 states that “[t]o him that overcometh…I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name written, which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it” (13). As Jane sits at the temple Haeinsa, which was the temple of the monks who helped to heal the queen, she picks up “a small white stone the size of [her] palm” (14). Though this passage may have little initial meaning to the reader, a second glance after reading up through Jane’s journey to Korea and her mother’s illness reveals that these stories she is sharing are part of her path to overcoming the sadness in her life and becoming a new person.