MEDITATIONS ON HOME
Tess
Gerritsen
I am an alien in my own
town. This frigid corner of America is as far from China as one
can travel,
yet this is where I choose to live – an odd decision, you might think,
because
here I can never truly be comfortable in my own skin. With my
black hair
and Asian eyes, I am as conspicuous as a Martian when I walk down Main
Street.
I worry that my
transgressions will be noticed. Was I curt with that store clerk?
Was my tip too paltry at the local diner? I imagine them
whispering: "That's how all Chinese must be, penny-pinching and
rude."
Willingly or not, I am
the ambassador for my race, one and a half billion Chinese strong, and
I take
my responsibility seriously. I am always on my best behavior.
I
smile too much. I tip extravagantly. I am the model American
citizen.
The effort leaves me
exhausted. Yet here I persist, living among people with Western eyes
who look
nothing like me, people whom (to be perfectly honest) I have trouble
telling
apart. But this is where I have landed, for better or worse,
bringing
with me the DNA of ancestors who could never have imagined how far a
future daughter
would travel -- to the state of Maine.
Internationally
bestselling author Tess Gerritsen is a graduate of
Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco
School of
Medicine. Gerritsen started writing fiction while on maternity leave
from her
work as a physician and published her first novel, Call
After Midnight in 1987. Since then she has written Life
Support (1997), Bloodstream (1998), Gravity (1999),
The
Surgeon (2001), The Apprentice (2002), The Sinner
(2003), Body
Double (2004), Vanish (2005), The Mephisto Club
(2006), The
Bone Garden (2007), The Keepsake (2008; UK title: Keeping
the
Dead), and Ice Cold (2010; UK title: The Killing Place),
among others, and her name became a constant fixture on the New
York Times bestseller list.
Gerritsen’s books have been translated into 37 languages, and more than
20
million copies have been sold around the world. Now retired from
medicine, she
writes full time. She lives in Maine.