For Allison Hong Merrill, the holiday season is tinged with memories of rejection. Nearly 30 years ago, on Chinese New Year’s Eve, she returned from college to her village in Taiwan with a bold announcement. Then 21, she told her father she intended to leave the university to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To Hong Merrill’s father, the decision was unthinkable — she had secured a coveted spot at the university in Taipei, a rare and prestigious achievement. How could she possibly throw that away? By the end of their heated exchange, he disowned her and ordered her never to return home.
Three years later, married and living in Texas, she experienced yet another life-shattering rejection. While she was out with a neighbor, her American husband of 16 months emptied their apartment of all their belongings and vanished. Having recently arrived from Taiwan, she had relied on him to interpret for her and to navigate social interactions on her behalf. It was a week before Thanksgiving, and Hong Merrill found herself completely alone in a foreign country, barely able to speak English.
In the aftermath, she grappled with the immediate challenges of survival — finding a place to live, buying groceries, figuring out what came next. But these rejections also compelled her to confront a deeper struggle of reclaiming her identity and self-worth. With her roles as a wife and daughter stripped away, and no one left to speak for her, Hong Merrill asked herself: When everything else is gone, who am I and where do I truly belong?
Searching for the answer, she resolved not to be voiceless anymore. So she began writing.
Utah author Allison Hong Merrill poses for a portrait in her office at her home in Orem on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. | Brice Tucker, Deseret News
Her memoir, “Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops,” was released in 2021 and went on to win more than 60 awards, including the grand prize of the 2021 Millennium Book Award in the U.K. and the grand prize in the 2022 Shelf Unbound Indie Best Contest.
Most recently, she’s part of a new book with an eye-catching title: “The Not-So-Secret Lives of REAL ‘Mormon’ Wives,” published in November by Cedar Fort Publishing & Media, the largest independent Latter-day Saint publisher. Hong Merrill is one of eight women who contributed stories from the perspective of faithful Latter-day Saints. Among others are the fashion designer Fernanda Böhme, mental health educator Ganel-Lyn Condie and podcaster Caroline Melazzo.
Hong Merrill told me she hasn’t seen the Hulu show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” — after reading reviews, she opted not to watch. But she welcomed the chance to share her story in the book, which set out to offer a “true representation of what it means to be a successful ‘Mormon wife,’” according to Emily Clark, the acquisitions and marketing manager at Cedar Fort who curated and edited the stories for the book.
In her chapter, Hong Merrill writes about her parents’ Armageddon-like fighting while growing up in a slum village in Taiwan, her troubling divorce, and how, as a 13-year-old, for the first time in her life, she could envision the possibility of unconditional love and acceptance after meeting Latter-day Saint missionaries.
On that Chinese New Year’s Eve, after the fight with her father, she could only cling on to her faith. She wrote: “If I walked alone, should I still walk? Yes. I knew how to be alone. I knew how to move in the dark. I kept walking.”
Allison Hong Merrill, left, pictured with a younger sibling in 1981. Merrill is an award-winning author from Utah who was born in Taiwan. | Hong Merrill family photo
‘Who am I?’
Growing up in Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s, Hong Merrill, 51, was steeped in a culture that prioritized male authority and lineage, where men made decisions and dictated the order of society. The Chinese saying translated as “heavy male, light female” encapsulated the view that men’s souls were “heavier” — or more significant — than women’s, she told me. Women were to live by “three obediences: to their father, their husband, and sons in widowhood.” Hong Merrill’s parents regretted they didn’t have a son, and they didn’t hide their disappointment from Hong Merrill and her three sisters.
During one Chinese New Year celebration, she recalled squatting with other girls and women in the kitchen, waiting for the men to finish their feast, prepared by the women, who would later eat the men’s leftovers. On another occasion, Hong Merrill’s grandmother banned her from joining her male cousins when they went to the store to get snacks, simply because she was a girl. These experiences of being treated as second-class contributed to her shaky sense of self-worth. “I was a person, but I was not treated as a person,” she said.
The patriarchal dynamics amplified the turbulent environment in her home. Her mother would leave Hong Merrill and her younger sister alone at home for hours without food, toys or clean clothes, Hong Merrill told me. “In the morning, she would walk past me out the door and she would leave as if she never saw me,” she said. She doesn’t remember her mom ever hugging her.
Her father drank and once chased her mother into an alley with a butcher’s knife in hand. He blamed her for not giving him a son and thus ending his bloodline. Hong Merrill’s mother, who died in 1997, would leave him, then return, and the cycle would start over again. Watching her parents’ tumultuous relationship, Hong Merrill wondered: “Why can’t women be happy like men?”
Yet, she also recalled clinging to a more hopeful insight from Chinese culture — a teaching of the Chinese philosopher Confucius that resonated with her: “under the heavens, there is but one family.”
When Hong Merrill’s father met Latter-day Saint missionaries in Taiwan, he expressed no interest in the church. But Hong Merrill, who was then 13, saw in the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints something she’d never had before.
“I grew up in a home with no love and no warmth, but when the missionaries came to my home, it looked like the sun was behind them,” she told me. “Then I thought: I want that. I want the feelings that they brought to my family.” Hong Merrill and her sisters went on to convert to the church.
But Hong Merrill’s conversion, and later the decision to serve a mission, precipitated a rift from her father. After passing the National University Entrance Exam, she was among the top 20% of high school graduates on the island — those who got to go to college. Abandoning this opportunity was disgraceful to her father. But she did not foresee how drastic their fallout would be over her decision to go on a mission. “I expected him to be furious, but I didn’t expect him to disown me,” she told me. That night, out on the street, Hong Merrill looked for coins in pay phone slots in order to find a place to go for the night.
Next, she had to figure out: “If I was not his daughter anymore, then who am I? Am I not a child anymore?”
Allison Hong Merrill, pictured at 15 years old before her baptism in Hualien, Taiwan, Nov. 20, 1988. | Hong Merrill family photo
No longer voiceless
With the help of church members, she went on to serve a mission in Taichung, Taiwan. Since college, she’d maintained correspondence with a former missionary she’d met as a university freshman in Taipei. After her mission, “Cameron” — a pseudonym she used in the memoir for privacy — invited her to continue her schooling at a university in Texas, where he was studying (she has kept out the name of the school for privacy reasons). Securing a scholarship, she moved to the United States and they were married in 1996.
Initially, Hong Merrill struggled adjusting to life in a new country with a new language. Her husband, who spoke Chinese, interpreted for her and communicated on her behalf in social situations. It was a convenient arrangement, or so it seemed at first. Conversations often happened around her, yet not with her, leaving her feeling lost and insecure. “They’re laughing. Are they laughing at me? I don’t know, you know?” she told me. She had a story, but she wasn’t the one telling it. “I thought, OK — I don’t want other people to tell my story,” she told me.
Sixteen months into the marriage, the couple had a heated fight. Looking for a friend to confide in, Hong Merrill went to visit a Taiwanese neighbor. When she returned two hours later, her apartment was eerily silent. She flipped the light switch, but the light wouldn’t come on. In the darkness, she could make out the austere contours of the space. The apartment was empty — furniture gone, except the bed; Cameron — gone. He had moved out, she learned shortly after, turning off electricity, ending the apartment contract and turning in the key to the manager.
“I thought: This can’t be real,” Hong Merrill recalled. “It was so surreal.” After trying to get cash from their joint account, she discovered that Cameron transferred all their money to another account. He even served her a restraining order. She later wrote about coming to terms with her new status: “penniless, homeless, family-less, soulless …”
In her solitude — again — Hong Merrill was confronted with the grief of abandonment. She was at the crossroads. “I felt like I was being thrown into the swimming pool and metaphorically I had to learn how to stay alive on my own because nobody was coming to save me,” she told me. In this crucible of hardship, she turned to her faith: “People can fail you over and over again, but only God can provide the kind of help that is lasting.”
Yet, helpers along the way embraced Hong Merrill. An older couple from Utah who served a mission in Taiwan invited Hong Merrill to live with them and integrated her into their family — “this was my first experience feeling loved as a child,” she wrote in her book. Hong Merrill eventually transferred to Brigham Young University, where she went on to study Chinese. In 2016, she earned a master’s degree in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Rachel Rueckert, a fellow memoir writer who’s gotten to know Hong Merrill through a writing group, told me she recognized parallels between Hong Merrill’s turbulent upbringing and the early life of Tara Westover, the author of “Educated.”
Cedar Fort’s Emily Clark called Hong Merrill’s writing “absolutely exquisite.” “She painted such a vivid and sad picture but then she was able to take it and slowly weave in hope as her story went on,” Clark told me.
And this hope isn’t just a narrative device — it’s who Hong Merrill is every day.
“Allison walks into a room and you feel her presence and her love,” Rueckert told me. “You would never guess the things that she has overcome.” During a challenging time in Rueckert’s life, Hong Merrill gave her an hourglass for one-hour writing sprints. “She tries to create the world that she wants to live in, and that world is better for all of us to live in,” Rueckert said.
Allison Hong Merrill, pictured on the bottom row, forth from left, in Hualien, Taiwan, 1979. Merrill is an award-winning Utah author who was born in Taiwan. | Hong Merrill family photo
‘A devoted parent is self-made’
How did Hong Merrill achieve forgiveness, or at least some form of letting go, after all these years?
“I’ve learned that I would do myself a disservice if I keep waiting for my dad or for Cameron to come and apologize to start the process of forgiving them,” she said. She wouldn’t let them dictate the terms of her forgiveness, she explained. “If I do, I’m giving them way too much power to control me,” she said. “They are holding my peace hostage.”
After the divorce, she no longer had contact with Cameron. But if she did, she’d “send him blessings because that’s what I want people to say to me if I had accidentally offended anyone.”
As for her father, Hong Merrill helped him and her sisters immigrate from Taiwan to the U.S. They now live in Utah, but Hong Merrill and her father are still not on the best terms. She tells me, semi-jokingly, that she kind of respects that he’s stuck with his views. But she’s also still a little surprised by his unflinching disapproval after all these years, even after Hong Merrill brought him over to the U.S.
She got married again in 1998 to a man she met while teaching Chinese at the Missionary Training Center in Provo — he taught Japanese. For her new family, she was determined to create a childhood — and a life — that was vastly different from her own. Along with her husband, she raised three sons, now in their 20s. When they were younger, she was often the first one in line to pick them up from school. She made sure to be there for them both emotionally and physically, offering the stability and care she said her own parents never provided. She’s now a grandmother, with a second grandchild on the way. “Even though I wasn’t privileged to grow up in a loving home, I had a choice to become a future mother who gives that blessing to her children. A devoted parent is self-made,” she wrote in her memoir.
Celebrating the power to speak
She now writes from her home office in Orem, with a sign behind her desk that reads: “Be obsessed with love and kindness.” With her writing, she has weathered rejection — the manuscript for “Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops,” which went on to collect dozens of awards, garnered 149 rejections from agents during the query process. But she didn’t take the rejections personally — writing is an art, while publishing is a business, she said. “Every story, if you just tell it the best you can, write it the best you can, you will have an audience to receive your work,” said Hong Merrill, who published the memoir with a hybrid publishing house, which combines aspects of both traditional and self-publishing.
Hong Merrill is at work on two new books, including a novel she envisions as a prequel to her memoir. It draws on the genealogy work she began in Taiwan after joining the church, tracing her ancestry to a secret society of princes from 800 B.C.
“She’s the hardest working writer I have ever known,” said Rueckert. “And she fought very hard for everything that she has.”
Hong Merrill’s creative drive, she told me, comes from the same longing she had experienced as a little girl — to be seen and acknowledged, her experiences affirmed. “I’ve always had to prove to people that ‘I’m right here,’ that I have worth,” she said. Now she’s celebrating her power to speak and is determined to make sure her voice endures. Writing down her story, she explained, is like carving into a tree trunk: “Allison was here.”
Utah author Allison Hong Merrill’s awards from writing hang in her office at her home in Orem on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. | Brice Tucker, Deseret News