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“Why are they wasting all that money and energy on a goddamn half-breed trailer-trash kid?”
This question, posed in the first chapter of Ursula, Under, spills venomously from the lips of the inebriated Jinx Muehlenberg as her television beams to her the unfolding story of two-and-a-half-year-old Ursula Wong. Hours earlier, Ursula’s Chinese-American father Justin and her Finnish-American mother Annie watched in disbelief as she disappeared down an abandoned mine shaft. Now, as Ursula lies silent beneath the earth, the reader is given an elaborate answer to Jinx’s unfeeling query. We learn to care about Ursula, not merely because she is young, innocent, and beloved by her parents, but because her life is the culmination of an astonishing genealogy, dating back to ancient China and Finland.
In a series of stories, interspersed with the details of Ursula’s attempted rescue, we discover that her ancestors have endured against impossible odds and that their combined legacy is now encapsulated within the tiny body trapped in the mine—a body made precious by heredity and history.
Like Ursula herself, the stories of these ancestors lie buried and silent. They are unknown even to Annie and Justin as they anxiously await word of their daughter’s fate. However, through the panoramic vision and striking prose of Ingrid Hill, these stories rise one by one above the surface. They tell of a brilliantly improbable collection of characters: a philosophical Chinese alchemist desperate to produce an heir; a Finnish maiden saved by her deafness from blood sacrifice; the young playmate of a Swedish princess; an irresponsible abalone fisherman; a mining supervisor who himself perished in a mining accident; and a host of others. Alternating between tales of relatives long dead and stories of the struggles of those still living, Hill revives memories and resurrects lost dreams and expired passions. She writes unflinchingly of disasters and tenderly of triumphs. “All back story is also story,” Hill advises the reader early on, and she proceeds to prove it, illustrating that, out of the purest randomness of human association, unique miracles are persistently born. If it is Ingrid Hill’s principal goal to convince us that little Ursula Wong is such a miracle, it is also part of her project to show that each of us is a bit miraculous as well.
And yet, standing at the periphery of all these marvels, like a bad fairy in a child’s nursery tale, is the malignant presence of Jinx Muehlenberg, whose role in the lives of the Wong family is persistent and unreasoningly evil. As Jinx casually spews racist condemnations at her television and as Justin and Annie wonder if they will ever see their child again, the reader becomes aware that a third delicate excavation is taking place within these pages. Ursula, Under is not only about liberating a little girl from a dark hole and retrieving the past from lapsed memory; it is also about the ceaseless struggle to extract moments of goodness and purity from a world of tragedy.
(Introduction provided by the publisher)
Ingrid Hill is the author of the short story collection Dixie Church Interstate Blues. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa and has twice received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has twelve children, including two sets of twins. She lives in Iowa City.
(Biography provided by the publisher)
