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Digging to America is Anne Tyler‘s seventeenth novel but the first I have read.  The title comes from a brief discussion between Bitsy and her adopted daughter Jin-Ho in which Jin-Ho imagines Chinese children digging a hole through the earth and communicating with the children they find in Baltimore. Such easy communication is very different from the adult relationships in the novel.

Two families first meet at the airport in Baltimore when they receive their adopted Korean daughters. They decide to celebrate the arrival day with an annual party. The parties become more and more elaborate as the families compete with each other.

Susan is raised by her Iranian/American family according to American ways but Brad and Bitsy attempt to retain Jin-Ho’s Korean origins and those of her little sister, Xiu-Mei, when she is adopted from China.

Apart from little Jin-Ho, I found none of the characters in the novel endearing, though interest develops when the newly bereaved American father of Bitsy creates a relationship with Susan’s grandmother. The progress of that relationship is an intriguing study of cultural diversity and the problems that can arise.

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