Foreign Seed
An American diplomat stationed in Nanking, China, sets off to find and retrieve a missing fellow countryman in this elegantly told tale of love, loss, and acceptance loosely based on actual events. Inspired by the life story of Frank Meyer, famed American plant explorer, Alsup begins her story with Meyer’s actual disappearance from a passenger ship en route to Shanghai in June 1918. Newly promoted Vice Consul Samuel Sokobin (also a historical figure) is charged with investigating his disappearance and dutifully packs a bag and heads upriver in the company of his Chinese interpreter, Mr. Lin. What follows is a hazy, dream-like journey between memory and reality, as Sokobin veers from thoughts of his missing-in-action pilot brother, Ethan, to navigating the curious mysteries of Meyer’s vanishing: did he fall overboard, or did someone engineer it? Through a gauntlet of interviews with porters, boatmen—and even Sokobin’s old college friend, Arthur Chase—the vice consul and the “preternaturally reserved” Lin find a shared bond that breaks down the walls of cultural isolation: they each have a brother serving in the war… and each of those brothers is “much better looking,” as Lin quips to Sokobin’s delight.
Alsup’s imagination is impressive as she spins a complete world around Sokobin—including a fictional flashback between Sokobin and Meyer—that takes key facts from the official records and weaves a multilayered story abounding in weighty themes: anti-Semitism, racism, and the clash of foreign cultures. Alsup’s deft and descriptive prose delivers up a heaving, bustling, and vibrant China that Sokobin cannot seem to escape after several years in diplomatic service. Could it be that “China is very old and full of ghosts,” as he recalls his college professor intoning?
Foreign Seed is an exceptionally written and beautiful story that deserves a wide readership.
