Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family

The opening of Mitch Albom’s memoir of his time with Chika Jeune clearly illustrates his love for Chika and the wrenching pain her death caused him. He describes a relationship that includes Parental and Familial Bonds despite Chika’s vastly different origins and lack of blood relation to him and Janine. Albom also notes that the orphans’ parents showed bravery in making the difficult decision to give their children up for a better life. This illustrates the sacrifice that parents and families must sometimes make for their children.

He expresses uncertainty over his ability to write about the subject, as he is still coming to terms with Chika’s loss. Albom has written several books, many of which are memoirs, and he uses writing to process big questions and remember people who changed his life. Finding Chika thus exists as an act of servitude paying homage to Chika, remembering her life and personality, and searching for acceptance of her death. Albom includes intimate details of his grief and regret, and he does not shy away from admitting his faults, anxieties, and mistakes. He describes visions of Chika and includes conversations with her ghost as part of his writing process, Sharing Time with her even after her death. These conversations with Chika’s ghost both illuminate aspects of Chika’s character and help Albom come to terms with his grief. Albom also admits to being selfish with his time for most of his life and explains how doing so took away his wife’s opportunity to have a child of her own. Chika taught Albom that sharing time is far more valuable than hoarding it. Albom thus presents the gaps in his life and explains how Chika filled them.

Throughout the memoir, he writes as if he were talking directly to Chika, speaking tenderly but honestly and complimenting her in the ways he did when she was alive. By depicting conversations with Chika in which she pushes him to write the memoir, Albom expresses his reluctance to confront his grief. Chika’s ghost orders him, “Tell me my story” (7), and he addresses the sections of the narrative that discuss Chika’s life to her directly. This creates a sense of intimacy and connection to Chika, who criticizes Albom’s writing at first, wanting to ensure that he tells her story honestly and completely: “Don’t talk like that. Like I’m a baby” (9).

Albom and Janine Albom live in Michigan, but Albom describes feeling a responsibility to take over the orphanage where Chika ultimately ended up following the earthquake. Though he has spent many months of his life in Haiti, he knows he can never fully understand what it means to be Haitian. He can understand, however, how important being Haitian was to Chika’s story and to honoring her. Albom emphasizes that, though Chika lived and died in America, her identity was Haitian, and her love for and belonging to Haiti were palpable. In describing Chika’s early years, including the devastating 2010 earthquake and her family’s dissolution after her mother’s death, Albom shows that Chika’s life story is a Haitian story. These events, Albom believes, shaped Chika, who demonstrated fortitude and resilience due to the circumstances of her early life. Chika was “birthed into the soil of her homeland […] all its roiling rage and beauty” (11).

Albom organizes his memoir into a series of seven lessons that he learned from Chika—one for each year of her life. Each lesson is based on a trait that Albom admired in Chika and that forced him to grow as a person. Albom hints at these in the memoir’s introduction. He talks about the resilience of the children at the orphanage and The Wonder of Childhood that he observed in them despite their having lost everything they knew. Their hope and laughter inspired Albom and made him want to do even more to help. Chika, in particular, was brazen and bossy and had a confidence that was purely a part of her.