Karin K. Jensen is the author of the new memoir The Strength of Water, which focuses on her mother's life. Jensen writes for the Alameda Post, and she lives in California.
Q: What inspired you to write The Strength of Water?
A: Throughout my childhood, my mother told stories of growing up in her father’s Chinese laundry business during the infancy of the auto industry in Detroit, 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.
There were tales Dickensian in their pathos, of those who take advantage of the poor, of family addictions, painful racism, wartime privations, the perils of marrying too young, and then feeling trapped in marriage by social pressures.
But there were also stories about the strength of family, the kindness of strangers, and the power, as she put it, of fighting for your little slice of happiness in this world before you pass on. Along the way, she revealed history from fascinating perspectives –a woman’s perspective, an immigrant daughter’s, and a life on the margins.
For me, the stories felt mythological, so far removed from my vanilla, comfortable upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area. I grew up in an upper-middle-class community in a two-bedroom house next to a mansion so large that it extended from one street to the next, making me feel like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.
How had this transformation happened in a single generation when my mother had not even had the chance to finish high school? This is what I wanted to record.
Q: The writer Kao Kalia Yang said of the book, “The Strength of Water is a daughter’s careful excavation of her mother’s story...written with tremendous love and authenticity.” What do you think of that description, and how did you research the book?
A: I greatly admire Kao Kalia Yang’s body of work, the way she has written in many genres – from family memoirs like mine to children’s books to the libretto for an opera. I was ecstatic when she kindly agreed to review my book, and I am grateful for her kind words.
The process did feel like a bit of an excavation. Growing up, I loved the Little House on the Prairie series, which gave me a glimpse into how women and girls lived their everyday lives during pioneer days.
These books inspired me to interview Mom and her siblings about the fine details of their childhoods and youth: What was it like doing laundry in the 1920s? What did you learn in school? How did you care for babies without diapers or running water in the village, and what were weddings and funerals like?
Many of my mom’s and aunties’ stories I had heard at family gatherings. But during my interviews, I pressed them for fine details because I find them fascinating. For historical context, I conducted research; the bibliography is in the book.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Although my mother would not have described herself as a Taoist, the book’s title was inspired by a verse from the Tao Te Ching, the founding document of Taoism. Taoism is a Chinese philosophy based on the writings of Lao-Tzu, a 6th-century BC philosopher who emphasized living in harmony with the Tao, an underlying spiritual force of the universe.
Taoism and Confucianism were influential in the culture in which she grew up, and when I studied the Tao Te Ching as an adult, I was struck by how closely the philosophy aligned with my mother’s approach to life.
A central concept is wu-wei or effortless action. It suggests that often, less direct intervention leads to better outcomes. So, for instance, if someone is coming at you with great force, rather than trying to meet them equally, you might move with the incoming force to reduce its effect, then roll with it to throw your opponent off balance. You see this technique in martial arts.
But the way I saw my mother implementing this philosophy was in her reaction to other people’s bad behavior. I never heard her say, “Oh, I’ll give her a piece of my mind,” or “Boy, I’ll take him to the cleaners.” I felt that she viewed people’s bad behavior as their own reward, something that would lead to their self-destruction without her interference. She preferred to disengage, remain focused on her path, and flow around them.
When she was going through a divorce, for instance, most of her in-laws quietly withdrew from her as she was no longer a part of their family, but one sister-in-law, in a fit of spite, poured sugar into her gas tank, damaging my mother’s car.
My mother chose not to retaliate! She was upset, but rather than respond in anger, she viewed it as the final parting blow of a painful marriage, and a further impetus to make a fresh start. She and her sister-in-law lived on the same block of a poor neighborhood. She started shopping for a new home.
There is a verse in the Tao Te Ching that says, “Water is fluid, soft, yielding. But water will wear away rock…what is soft is strong.” That so reminded me of my mother. She did not wield sword strength. But she persisted, forever and a day. She kept flowing, whether around, over, or seeping through cracks.
As a divorced, minority woman in 1960, procuring a home in a better neighborhood felt nearly impossible, even though she had saved a 20 percent down payment and was steadily employed. Her realtor took her to see a few homes, but she never got to see the insides. He would leave her outside while he went in to ask the owners if they were willing to sell to Chinese, and the answer was always no.
But she didn’t give up.
The experience of not getting to see the insides of homes for sale was repeated with a second realtor. A third wouldn’t even bother showing her around. Finally, a fourth helped her find a sympathetic seller willing to give her a chance. With deep gratitude, she moved into a quality home in a good neighborhood where she felt safe raising my older sister.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: For me, the biggest impact of these stories is that whenever I’m tempted to feel sorry for myself, I have a ready-made reality check. My problems are first-world. I don’t worry about where my next meal will come from or whether I might die from a readily treatable medical condition. When I think something is hard, I remind myself, “This problem is a privilege to have.”
Each of us embarks on a journey to find a sense of belonging, a sense of where we fit into the world. When you’re an immigrant, or an immigrant daughter, that story is so much more challenging—sometimes epic.
My mother had the somewhat unique experience of starting life here in the U.S., and when her mother died, her father brought the family back to his village in China to get a new wife. In the village, they stepped back a hundred years in progress. They had lived poorly in America, but they had plumbing, electricity, a telephone, and access to a doctor.
In my grandfather’s village, there were none of these. There were outhouses, oil-wick candles, communication by letter, and old wives’ tales in place of health care. Moreover, there was no social safety net at all during a period rife with political and economic turmoil — no trusty food bank nor government benefits.
In the middle of all this, the Sino-Japanese War broke out, with soldiers instructed to “live off the land,” pillaging their poor village, and Zero planes flying so low overhead that my mother could see the faces of the pilots.
In these situations, families make desperate decisions to survive – perhaps whether to send a family member to another country, possibly as an illegal immigrant in the hope they will send home some money, whether to sell daughters into servitude, or sometimes even whether to commit infanticide--decisions impossible to imagine in our first-world lives.
And yet, too often, immigrants are treated as second- or third-class citizens, and in the case of undocumented workers, as nothing more than lawbreakers and criminals. And so, we peel away their humanity. We learn not to care what happens to them. When we hear of an undocumented worker being mistreated, we shrug and say, “Well, that’s too bad, but what did they expect coming here illegally?”
My hope is that stories like The Strength of Water help tear down the walls we build around our hearts.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: At the moment, I’m trying to keep up with my day jobs —writing for the Alameda Post and teaching dance to children—while also working on book publicity.
However, in 2026, I’d love to work on a screenplay version of The Strength of Water. My daughter is an art student who expressed interest in creating a graphic novel version of the book. She explained that if I wrote a screenplay —which would simplify the story, describe it visually, and create dialogue —she could use it as the basis for a graphic novel.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I enjoy participating in book clubs or other literary events in person or over Zoom. I can be reached through my website: karinkjensen.blog.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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