Have you ever experienced a situation that binds your life irrevocably with that of a stranger? That’s the premise of Anne Tyler’s new novel, Digging to America.

The Place: Baltimore airport

The Date: Friday, August 15, 1997

The Event: Two families anxiously wait for their infants (whom they’re adopting from Korea) to emerge from the plane.

The babies arrive, and both sets of new parents introduce themselves to one another. Thus begins the unlikely friendship formed between a thoroughly American Caucasian family and an Iranian-American family.

In the coming weeks, the new parents compare notes about how their daughters are doing. Bitsy, a bossy, micro-managing homemaker, pursues the relationship, irritating everyone (including the reader) as she continuously boasts about her daughter and distributes unsolicited parenting advice to her fellow adoptive mom, Ziba.

While Tyler narrates the story from the perspective of several characters, she features Maryam Yazdan, the grandma of Ziba and Sami Yazdan’s baby. Maryam, who immigrated to the U.S. from Iran at age 19 and was widowed before she was 40, has always struggled to fit in to American society. She simultaneously yearns to hold on to Iranian traditions and to fully assimilate into a society whose rules she will never completely understand.

Maryam gets plenty of opportunities to observe the parallel universe in which the two families live as the Yazdans establish a friendship of sorts with the Dickinson-Donaldsons. At first, their interactions are boundaried by the “Arrival Parties” they throw yearly to honor the August 15 arrival of their daughters.

Bitsy says, “I believe the girls should get to know each other, don’t you? So as to maintain their cultural heritage.”

She dresses her daughter up in full Korean regalia for every Arrival Party (something her daughter grows to resent), and the two families trade off hosting the extravaganza, trying to outdo each other by serving an array of ethnic delicacies representative of their respective cultures.

After about the fourth Arrival Party, I began to wonder if anything else was ever going to happen in this novel. Even the characters seemed bored (a subtle hint to parents adopting internationally not to overdo the forced cultural enrichment activities). Whether the author intentionally planned that we would tire of the Arrival Parties, I don’t know. But thankfully, she veered off in a different direction, honing in on the developing relationships among the book’s key players.

Although I'm not a huge Anne Tyler fan, Digging to America is the kind of “slice of life” novel I enjoy (once we got past the dreaded Arrival Parties). Ironically, the novel didn’t touch much on adoption or even on cultural issues as they relate to adoption. Tyler used the girls’ adoption as a springboard from which to examine larger cultural issues as they played out in the lives of two families. Her characters were thoughtful, intelligent, and realistic.

I always wonder how authors come up with the titles for their novels and couldn’t guess the significance of “Digging to America.” But I figured it out when Bitsy and her husband decide to adopt a second child, this time, from China.

Their daughter, Jin-Ho, wonders whether her new little sister will feel homesick when she arrives in America; whether she’ll decide America is not as nice as China. Jin-Ho recalls the time she and her friend tried to “dig a hole to China.” She asks her grandpa whether kids in China try to dig to America.

Jin-Ho’s childlike version of the world summarizes the underlying theme of the novel—perhaps the underlying theme so many of us subconsciously long for—a world “where children in Mao jackets and children in Levi’s understood each other so seamlessly.”

Related Review at the Korean Adoption blog