The Hunger of Memory

I’ve been really excited about the PBS series “Faces of America” hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (yes, the one who was involved in that bitter dispute with Obama last summer). It explores the histories of the families of famous celebrities including Stephen Colbert, Eva Longoria, Kristi Yamaguchi, Meryl Streep, Louise Erdrich, Yo Yo Ma, just to name a few. . .

I’ve watched up to Episode 3 and wow, let me tell you, the stories are beautifully woven together. There was one part where they traced Meryl Streep’s ancestors to the founders of Pennsylvania who fought in a bloody war against the Native Americans fighting for their land. And immediately afterward, Louise Erdrich explains about her Native Americans’ ancestors experience of being exploited by colonial settlers to give up their land.

Gates even visited China to uncover the past of Yo Yo Ma’s history that Ma’s father never told him. At first Gates was unlucky in finding written historical records (though he found graves and empty houses), but by a stroke of luck, Gates was contacted when they found the Ma family book dating back to the 1300s. Ma’s 7th great-grandfather recorded short biographies of males in each generation (unfortunately, no females), the family poem, and values to be passed on from generation to generation. The book was hidden behind a wall during the Communist Revolution and forgotten about until it fell out one day during demolition of the building. Ma, whose father was always so tight-lipped about the China he left behind, was suddenly left with hundreds of family history that he had never heard of before. I was sooo close to crying tears of emotion! Yo was so earnest in his thanks to Gates for providing him a paper-bound copy of his family history as well as uncovering this inheritance. I have so much respect for Yo, though I am not a fan of classical music.

Yo Yo Ma reflects on his Asian American identity and thinks about “home”

This really ties in to the multi-narrative, multi-generational narratives that I’ve been reading for my classes, such as Southland by Nina Revoyr (Japanese and African Americans in Los Angeles from the 1900s-1990s),Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia (the families affected by Communist Cuba, within and outside of Cuba), as well as other books I’ve read before such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Grandparents, parents, children all tell their stories, sharing their perspectives on huge historical events. They think about identity – as immigrants (or children of immigrants) living away from the ancestral homeland, learning their role in society in this newer homeland of the United States. . .

How important is memory in remembering/knowing “home”, where that may be? How does remembering really invest oneself in a familial legacy?

And then it hit me. I should begin to record oral histories of my relatives. Start compiling the Lins’ (my mother and father had the same last name before marriage, but they’re not cousins from my knowledge) family tree. My paternal grandparents live in Flushing, a 10-minute drive away, I could bring my handy-dandy tape recorder, transcribe and translate for future generations to come. My grandmother and my great-grandfather in Taiwan are far away, but I could contact my cousin in Taiwan to do that assignment for me since he obviously speaks Mandarin and Taiwanese a lot better than me. Coincidentally, he had actually told me in the summer when I was in Taipei that he had been wanting to interview them for the longest time. Just gotta get his e-mail from my mother. . .

To my knowledge, this is what I have so far:

My great-grandfather and grandmother had lived in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, my great-grandfather had fought for the Japanese in some war (no idea?) and my grandmother growing up under the Japanese education system (the Chinese ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895), back then when speaking Taiwanese was banned. In 1949, my paternal grandparents fled with the Nationalists (Kuomintang) from Communist China to Taiwan – my grandmother a Cantonese Hakka and daughter of a ranking Nationalist officer; my grandfather a Fukkienese son of a wealthy father who had willingly shared his wealth with the poor residents of his village.

And so the project begins. Remembering begins now.