A Book Review by Victor Turks, San Francisco, CA  October 2002

An Author Made of Heart---Teresa LeYung Ryan

Love Made of Heart, Kensington Publishing Corp., NY   311 pages

   No matter which way you cut it,  in the center of the Chinese word for love is the word 'heart.' While love proves elusive, behind Ryan's writing is a steady heartbeat, pounding out life's harrowing and beautiful irregularities.

    Bay Area author Teresa LeYung Ryan has written a wonderful book with a lot of heart. (Love Made of Heart; Kensington Publishing Corp., NY; October 2002). To make fine and compelling poetry out of a dysfunctional life takes some doing. And when all your dreams aren't working, it also takes enormous courage, sensitivity,  and compassion.

  "So many kinds of love.  Have you ever thought about that?” a character in Ryan's book asks.  And it could be Ryan herself posing the question in the sense that a writer is all her characters when she sets out to write a novel.

   “To borrow from Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner - and William Shakespeare – Teresa LeYung Ryan's book is a tale full of sound and fury signifying something."

    As the fascinating story unravels, we learn that the protagonist, first-person narrator Ruby Lin has a boss who's a jerk, a mother who's mad, and a broken-English speaking immigrant dad who routinely beats his wife, driving a "woe-is-me" Ruby to productive psychotherapy sessions with the all-knowing and sympathetic Dr. Thatcher, as in the old English, "thatch," meaning "to mend," "sort out," and "fix."  In a nutshell, heal.  At first Ruby pouts that "Psychotherapy is for the birds."  But then it dawns on her that birds can fly.  

   In Romeo and Juliet, another and much older story about first degree heartbreak, Shakespeare called psychotherapy plain old philosophy, and considered it "adversity's sweet milk."  No matter what you call it,  Ryan shows that the never-ending search for meaning in life goes on, as Ruby, with all the God-given strength she can muster,  tries to rise above the pain and confusion that pull so many people under. Over the football stadium wall at George Washington High School,  a stone's throw from where I live, loom Plato's words:  "Of All Victories the First and Greatest is for a Man ( or Woman ) to Conquer Himself ( or Herself )."  The great Greek philosopher challenges us to put that in our pipe and smoke it.  And the great-hearted Ryan holds out the same hope with her book. 

    Ryan - no, I take that back.  Ruby Lin, rather, has a powerful story to tell made of heart, yes, but also one with lots of earth, wind, and fire in it, which happens to be the name of the inspirational group whose music soothes Ruby's soul during very trying, emotionally and spiritually-speaking, times.

    As an artist, Ryan is superb, inviting the reader on a journey through thickets of pain and confusion to sanity and greater understanding of people and what makes them tick, for me the book's saving grace.  Ryan tells it lucidly like it is - and was - with admirable integrity and restraint. (No tedious over-writing for effect in this novel.)  In this beautifully balanced book,  all the heartbreak is revealed,  and all the healthy healing and hard-fought understanding, too.

   Though the tale is a tough one, and personal anguish abounds, we are not made to wallow in unrelieved despair and misery. With its reader-friendly tone of convincing realism and reassuring good sense,   Ryan's artful memoiresque novel delicately tip-toes the fine line between fiction and creative non-fiction, making believers of us all. "Is this stuff really true ? you wonder. "Did all that happen ?"   Like the great Homer, Ryan is a singer and "Love Made of Heart" is both the odyssey of her people and  her eloquent song.  Just like Earth, Wind, and Fire's "That's the Way of the World."   It sure is ! 

   With her debut book, a labor of love which took seven years to perfect, Ryan joins the pantheon of noteworthy writers whose work matters. Teresa LeYung Ryan is a name to remember.

 A REVIEW BY MARTHA ALDERSON
Love Made of Heart, Kensington Publishing Corp., NY  311 page

How does a young girl learn what it means to be woman? What if that girl is fresh from Hong Kong to San Francisco, and desperate to become a true American girl?

Ruby Lin, the protagonist in Teresa LeYung Ryan’s touching and redemptive debut novel LOVE MADE OF HEART, rejects Vivian, her mother, as a role model, unwilling to believe that the measure of a woman and wife is to accept her husband’s verbal and physical abuse. Instead, Ruby turns to American television and black-and-white movies, wanting only to become the Chinese-American equivalent of Sandra Dee.

We soon learn that Ruby’s relationship with Vivian is nothing like the one Samantha Stephens from “Bewitched” has with her mother. Ruby’s father is a far cry from the gentle and understanding men Ruby watches on “Family Affair”  and “Bachelor Father.”

But it is Joan Crawford, Ruby’s heroine from the movies, who teaches her how to handle men. When a boyfriend becomes disrespectful, Ruby does not fall into the role her mother assumed. In a scene that is perfectly paced and in vivid detail, we watch, as Ruby becomes Joan Crawford herself. We cheer for Ruby when she majestically rids herself of the brute.

Later, because Ruby has grown up believing that the Cartwright brothers from “Bonanza” were truly great men for the way they treat women and children, how can she resist when another of her suitors flashes a Michael Landon smile and proposes.

Throughout this sensitive tale, Teresa LeYung Ryan captures the lasting effects an abusive childhood has on Ruby, and chronicles Vivian’s descent into madness. Women readers of all ages would be well served to learn from the lessons Ruby learned on the silver screen. In her quest to become a true American, Ruby also learns how to become a woman.