No Wasted Word: Sidewalk Dancing by Letitia Moffitt
No Wasted Word is a bi-monthly column where Caitlin Reade Keenan discusses and reviews books by contemporary writers published by independent presses.
Written by Caitlin Reade Keenan
Somewhere in a suburban Hawaii there is a house that looks like a starfish. There are no hallways to divide the space. Each room has large windows that let in light. In this odd home live a family of three, each as odd and as isolated as the rooms of the curiously shaped house. This house and its three inhabitants are the subjects of Letitia Moffitt’s debut novel, Sidewalk Dancing (Atticus Books).
The novel, told in stories, follows the lives of three family members. Grace, a Chinese immigrant with an artistic eye and unflinching work ethic, who struggles to express herself in her second language. George, her husband, a man full of “big ideas, always ahead of, far behind, or just not in synch with his time,” and Miranda, their daughter, who marvels at her parents oddities and refers to herself as a “mutt” because of her Chinese-American heritage.
All of the characters are independent and leave their ancestral homes in search of identity. Whether they’re rejecting old identities, trying to create new ones, or forging a path that is the expression of their truest self is a theme of the book and one that Moffitt handles with grace and precision. “I don’t have to particularly feel bound to one land, one people, to the exclusion of all others. The problem with being this way, though, is that I don’t entirely belong anywhere: I’m never entirely at home; I never quite get away.”
The book’s early stories tell of Grace’s first years as an immigrant and the romance between her and George. The push and pull of their cross ethnic relationship is fascinating and Moffitt’s portrayal of their miscommunications and struggles is beautiful. “He never got it. He’d studied Asian history, he’d lived in Asia, he married an Asian woman, but he still never figured out why his incessant praise of his wife’s cooking made her embarrassed to the point of anger. She didn’t like being complemented like that. It was excessive. It was wrong, even, in the way it called attention to herself. But she couldn’t explain that to him.”
While her parents are forced to have the choices they’ve made develop in sometimes not so pleasant ways, Miranda observes and reacts to their eccentricities in exasperation. Moffitt’s take on Miranda’s youth is natural and unselfconscious, but as Miranda grows up and the stories shift to her path of independence, I found myself longing to get back to Grace and George and the young Miranda in the starfish house. Unfortunately, Moffitt only re-visits them briefly.
This narrative always pushes forward though. Just as it’s characters do, and just as people in real life do. Things happen. There are no sweeping gestures or unavoidable destinies. Plans are not made for a certain reason or driving force but for a multitude of needs and desires. Often, the goal is to part from the people that made us in hopes of claiming something of our own. But still, even far from home, away from the people who made us, it’s sometimes impossible to separate ourselves entirely. “There were things hidden and unexplained between us and separately within us that could never be spoken in any language or written in any book. We always knew they were there, though, no matter how we might fail in delivering to each other what we wanted at the moment.”
