The Foreign Service Journal, October 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2019 37 Finding My Mother: The Red Box Marion Naifeh, independently published, 2019, free/online. In Finding My Mother , published and available at the author’s website (marionnaifeh.com) , Marion Naifeh channels a deep sense of loss into an active search for belonging. Having experienced her mother’s passing at a very young age, Naifeh laments not knowing much about Carolyn March Lanphear—until the arrival of a hand-me-down, a red box. In it are her mother’s letters, artifacts, photographs and draw- ings from a decade spent in China, working as a missionary along- side her husband, B.W. By way of this unique collection of objects, Carolyn comes to life, and so do Chinese culture and history. Carolyn’s China was a politically fragmented country on the brink of civil war, and Naifeh smartly shares her father’s grounded reflections with the reader to fill in the current events, which only enhance Carolyn’s perceptive descriptions of life there. By the last chapter, the reader—and most important, Naifeh— is comfortably familiar with Carolyn March Lanphear and her journey to the heart of early 20th-century China. Marion Naifeh has spent most of her life abroad, teaching English and English literature for nearly six decades at such institutions as the University of Benghazi, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and Beijing’s Second Foreign Language Institute. She and her late husband, FSO George Naifeh, were posted in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Jordan and China. She is also the author of The Last Missionary in China (2003) and an autobiography, Foreign Service (2016). She lives in Aiken, South Carolina. No Ordinary Life: Awakenings in the Final Days of Apartheid Mary Ann Byron with Lori Windsor Mohr, Mountain High Publishing, 2018, $16/paperback, 310 pages. In 1992 Mary is climbing America’s corporate ladder for luxury hotel management, while her soon-to-be- husband, Patrick, is handling sensi- tive security matters as a Diplomatic Security Service special agent in Wash- ington, D.C. August of that year will upend their life together, however. They will wed and then leave friends and family for Cape Town, where Patrick is on assignment for two years. All too soon she will be forced to reconcile the pastoral South Africa she knows from the film Out of Africa with the South Africa she meets under apartheid. Life will not be as she imagined. Deftly melding personal narrative with political history, Mary writes here of her and Patrick’s time in Cape Town with sensitivity and maturity. Indeed, within the first pages of No Ordinary Life , on seeing army tanks rolling through the downtown she grasps the gravity of her new situation. This will not be an adventure of her own making but a “political pressure cooker” that tests her mettle. Mary’s relationships with colleagues and her husband will face tremendous stress in these two turbulent and historic years cul- minating in Nelson Mandela’s election as president—years that bring about her own “awakening.” Raised in Minnesota, Mary Ann Byron has worked in public relations around the world. In Cape Town she was a commu- nity liaison officer and USAID project coordinator at the U.S. embassy. She and her husband, Patrick, live in Colorado. Fragments From a Mobile Life Margaret Sullivan, Red Mountain Press, 2018, $25.95/paperback, 342 pages. Foreign Service spouse Margaret Sul- livan, a columnist for the Huffington Post whose work has appeared several times in The Foreign Service Journal , has assembled a rich collection of more than six dozen essays about life in 10 countries, in 29 homes, with four kids and more than 60 years of marriage to a career diplomat. Sullivan’s travels took her around the equator, including Burma, India, Malaya, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sierra Leone and Singapore. Her experiences span changes in the post- colonial world and women’s lives over several decades. She learned early on that on top of raising kids and hosting representational events, she needed “portable pursuits” in the days before Foreign Service wives were allowed to be employed. In Sierra Leone, she and a female photographer traveled all over the country to write a book, meeting with people who made everyday things such as baskets, hand weavings and fish nets. While the book was never published, the collection of items they gathered made its way to the Smithsonian.