Reviewed by Mary Jo Doig
Posted on: August 22, 2023
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A plane touches tarmac in Chengdu, China, in 1980 as the memoir Whispers from the Valley of the Yak opens. The author has returned to her birthplace with her parents, who as young missionaries fled war-torn China when she was a preschooler. They re-settled in West Virginia.
Fascinated, Tuxhill watched her mother transform into soft lovingness as she greeted her former Chinese female friends. She did not know this mother, as opposed to the critical, controlling person who had raised her. It was her loving father who had been her kind, humorous, supportive, storytelling parent.
The remainder of Part One, “Finding My Way,” shows Tuxhill growing up with an older sister in West Virginia, feeling she fit nowhere in her community, as her mother entered medical school and her father served as the new doctor in the small regional clinic.
Tuxill graduated from high school with no dream of who she might become; followed her sister to college; earned good grades; and met her future husband. They married, had two children, and moved to Alaska, where Tom joined a practice with his former college friend.
Alaska swiftly sparked Tuxill’s passion for the environment and led to her life’s calling, a passionate career of advocacy for Alaska. Five years later, though, Tom insisted they return home; he missed his family. Deeply reluctant, Tuxhill returned to New Hampshire with him.
Fortuitously, she learned of a new position as New Hampshire’s state advocacy representative for Alaska, applied, and was hired. Her children grew happy and proud as Tuxill’s work became more well known. Years later, after much hard work supporting the Alaska National Interest Lands Act of 1980, President Jimmy Carter invited Tuxill to the White House for the signing.
Sadly, but unsurprising, Tuxill’s marriage ”developed fissures” as she continued her beloved work. Several counseling attempts failed; her son and daughter were teens when Tuxill and her spouse divorced.
Part Two, “Finding My Parents,” showed Tuxill visiting her parents in 1991 after they’d moved years of scattered possessions into one home in Pennsylvania near the university they’d met two decades earlier. Tuxill helped them by sorting through huge numbers of paperwork cartons, there uncovering facts of her mother’s life that changed much for her.
Lastly, Part Three, “Finding Myself,” was the conclusion. Tuxill, with a two-week, packed itinerary, invited her son, daughter, and niece to a return flight to Chengdu, China, in part to scatter her parents’ ashes in places they had loved dearly. For me, this simply gorgeous journey was beyond anything I could have imagined for this story’s mesmerizing outcome.
Before opening Whispers from the Valley of the Yak: A Memoir of Coming Full Circle, I’d pondered the intriguing title, then studied the lovely cover: a mountain range that surrounded a small village in the valley. I noted the clarity of the scene in the foreground and that fog increasingly covered mountaintops farther into the background. As I closed the final page and returned to the cover, I saw the circle of the universal story both there and within the words I had just read. I saw how the title perfectly embraced the story. Lastly, I saw how the factor of place was the vibrant center of the circle. My visceral experience moved me deeply. Whispers from the Valley of the Yak is an exquisitely told, never-to-be-forgotten story.
