Palimpsest: the Story of a Name

The latest from veteran editor and director Mary Stephen (Ombres de soie) is a deeply personal, real-life detective story about the complicated and long-hidden history of her family and their Western surname.

Her father ’s immigration documents identify him as Henry Stephen, though her mother, whom she knew as Hilda, was listed under her Chinese name, Yick Chuk-Kwan. Uncovering a series of her father’s notebooks, Stephen discovers that both her parents had assumed names and conflicting accounts of their pasts. Her father had a peripatetic existence before he was even a teenager — his lineage includes a grandfather who appears to have been an aboriginal fisherman living in Australia. Her mother, who had literary aspirations, may have served as a liaison for an ill-fated love affair between a Chinese academic’s wife, an established writer herself, and Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf and son of Vanessa Bell, née Stephen.

But the deeper Stephen digs into her family’s past, the more she realizes that there are many competing narratives about their story — and the more her own projections and interests complicate her investigation. Against the background of colonialism, plus 20th-century strife and turmoil, Stephen explores how we create, dismiss, and recreate our own histories, asking whether our own aspirational versions of our past aren’t somehow closer to the truth.

ANITA LEE