Review: What We Inherit by Jessica Pearce Rotondi

Review by Stephanie Panozzo

What We Inherit
Jessica Pearce Rotondi
Unnamed Press, April 2020.
$26.00, 264 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-95121-307-7

What prompted me to finally read What We Inherit were wise words from my partner, “You need to read this.” Self-identified as “not a reader,” my boyfriend had stolen the book I wasn’t reading and within two business days, he had finished the book and flat out told me, “You need to read this. I want to talk about this book.” I had put off reading What We Inherit for many reasons, many of them personal, and it would be another day until I did. Meanwhile, my partner’s words and excitement lingered, egging me to reconsider why I hadn’t read this book. So I picked it up, the words secrets, lies, family, and CIA catching my eye and holding my attention straight into the night until it relinquished me with its last words: “let them go.” The story I had told myself, the mythos I had surrounding my own reading habits, was that I wasn’t ready to read a real story about family secrets and loss. Jessica Pearce Rotondi proved me wrong. This story is exactly what I needed: a story about coming to peace with the past.

What We Inherit surprised me in a way that I wasn’t ready for; in the same way Rotondi wasn’t ready when shortly after her mother died from cancer, she discovered a family secret stuffed in a filing cabinet. A secret that would lead Rotondi on a journey to the Southeast Asian country of Laos to “unbury” the dead, to resurrect the secret behind what happened to her Uncle Jack, and to reveal the stories of the Lao people, stories which are inextricably linked to Rotondi by way of loss and secrets. What We Inherit beautifully renders her family’s memories with the devastation of Laos throughout her personal pilgrimage, telling their stories to work through generations of loss and explore the obligation younger generations have to the narrative and mythos that bind and define their legacy.

What is so brilliant about What We Inherit is Rotondi’s choice to preface her memoir with Lord Byron’s poem of “Prometheus” as well as her prologue on the Pearce’s legacy of loss. Both the poem and the prologue have themes that run throughout the course of the novel, but more importantly, they are examples of stories that are passed down through generations. Coming from a line of storytellers, Rotondi masterfully juxtaposes Bryon’s poem and her family’s prologue to emphasize how stories become ingrained in history and in our personal mythos. 

Stories like her family’s search for her missing uncle Jack, an AC-130 gunner who dropped bombs in Laos. It is only when she discovers documents uncovering her family’s impassioned search for her missing uncle that she begins to question what mythos she has inherited and how to break from those patterns. These stories need to be told and not forgotten in order to break from the unhealthy narratives that are created by generations of secrets. This is what Rotondi is trying to achieve, and does achieve, with her memoir.

What We Inherit is Rotondi’s break from the legacy she inherited, but her discovery of her family’s tie to the secret war in Laos, makes the Laotians’ story her burden as well. By sharing her story she is rewriting the narrative on her own life, but also shining a light on the forgotten lives of the people of Laos. Sharing their untold history within her memoir, she breaks the truth on what really happened there, giving the reader the option to share what we have now inherited: the truth. But it also gives us the option to stay silent, continuing in the tradition of secrets and lies.   

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the tension in Rotondi’s memoir, particularly the narrative of a white woman’s pilgrimage to an Asian country to find herself. Though she does respect and listen to the advice of her guide, Mr. Ped, in regards to not questioning the people of the city, there is an instance where she goes rogue and approaches a group of men on her own. Where not a moment before Mr. Ped had informed her that the people of Laos are being threatened if they discuss the war, in a moment of desperation, knowing that she was at the end of a trail and still didn’t have the answers to what happened to her Uncle Jack. A white American woman demanding answers to absolve her grief is problematic, especially considering her uncle bombed Sepon. Rotondi’s privilege and American entitlement are not excusable, especially when her persistence for answers potentially put Mr. Ped in danger. 

Rotondi does recognize that this behavior is inexcusable and throughout the memoir, she questions herself and her presence in Sepon. As she makes her way through Southeast Asia, she treats the people and culture with nothing but respect. All the citizens and people of Vietnam and Laos have full lives, and not once is Rotondi judgmental or condescending towards the people who live in these countries. While visiting a Buddist temple, Rotondi bows down in front of a freshly painted Buddha seated among all the shattered ones that fill the room, destroyed from the bombs her uncle and other American soldiers dropped between 1964 and 1973. She is confronted with her Americanness and reflects, “I stand there, feeling as fragile as the house I’d seen, unsure of myself, of my right to be here, of my qualifications to ask these people about their lives.” By no means is her reflection here a consolation, or the end of what can be done for the people who still suffer in Laos. And Rotondi recognizes this truth as well. 

She does more than point out her privilege with reflections like these. In including chapters like “American Imperialism,” she creates an offering by sharing her knowledge of the secret war and America’s role in Laos’ destruction. Again, Rotondi constructs her entire narrative to lead up to the present day horrors in Laos. The fact that the “United States dropped two million tons of cluster bombs over Laos” is introduced at the beginning of the story and reiterated again as she reveals that “80 million [of the] 270 million cluster bombs [dropped] over Laos between 1964 and 1973” are still buried under the soil. As the narrative progresses so do the revelations about the war. Rotondi builds and builds on this narrative so that by the end, the final revelation is devastating. Laos is “the most heavily bombed country in the world per capita… [and] about fifty people a year still die from unexpectedly setting them off— forty percent of them children.” This memoir is more than her journey of processing grief and revealing family secrets. All of the accounts of destruction she finds in Laos, is an offering to those who have suffered and continue to suffer. As her story unfolds, it becomes clear that this narrative belongs to the Lao people, just as much as it belongs to her. 

Rotondi didn’t write her memoir to simply tell the story of her missing uncle or of her own self-discovery, but instead, she shared and addressed the conflict of being an American with the heritage of causing destruction. By doing so, she was able to resurrect the dead by bringing awareness, and potentially, informing the world that the war isn’t over for the people of Laos. What she inherited from her Uncle Jack, the story of the secret war in Laos and American’s part in its destruction, she brings awareness to and hopefully, some rectification. What We Inherit shows how we can learn from the past by sharing the stories of the dead. Like Prometheus, Rotondi is giving us the knowledge of the secret war in Laos; it’s what we do with what we inherit, that’s up to us.  

Stephanie Panozzo is a Southern California native and has her master’s degree in Creative Writing from California State University, Fullerton. She is a copy editor at Hypable.com and wrote under the pseudonym Steph Holliday for the limited release anthology, Romancing the Season.