From The Bottom Branch #11

A Bit About Papa Ben

My Grandfather was born in Grand Island, Nebraska in 1907 where my great grandparents ran a boardinghouse. I guess it must of been somewhat like the mother runs in Look Homeward Angel. Grand Island was a pretty wild town and had a lot of prostitutes and gambling. My father said that Grandpa told him stories about knife fights, horse races in the streets, and running errands for the floozies in the houses down the street. He said they paid him well he made more money some days than his older brothers who worked trades in town. When he was 12 years old his mother left his father who was a drunk and had run the boardinghouse into the ground with gambling. She took them to live with her family in San Fransisco in 1919. This I got from my father. My grandfather left home the next year and never saw his mother again. He was a tall strong boy and he was a good mechanic and carpenter and general good at figuring out how to fix things. He traveled around for a few years taking odd jobs and living with farm families “earning his keep” as he said. He worked from the Salinas Valley all the way up to Portland. When he grew tired of the work or people grew tired of him he moved on. He learned to hunt and fish and take care of himself in the wilderness. When he was 15 years old his sister somehow tracked him down to a farm in the Willamette Valley just north of Salem and asked him to come and live with her and get an education. She lived in Santa Rosa and needed a hand with her small ranch. “She said it was time I settled down to a little responsible livin’” my grandfather told my dad. “She is the only one of em’ worth a dime. The only one who cared about anyone but their own sorry self.” My aunt was a very old and tired woman the one time I met her, but she was full of questions about me and talked to my mother with such easy empathy that I remember those couple of hours vividly. I never met my grandfather except in passing. He never took much interest in family I guess.

More tomorrow, I hope.

From the Bottom Branch #10

The Recovery Continues

Yesterday afternoon I went to my new doctor here in Santa Cruz. He is an old guy with a soft German accent. I have a schedule of exercise to begin next Monday. I will go to yoga class Monday and Wednesday evenings two different types of yoga and swim for 1/2 an hour Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. My father says we can some easy walks on the weekends, but this week it is all rest as my body still needs to recuperate. I am up to going up and down the stairs to get the mail and a walk around the block which exhausted me, but my new doctor says I am doing fine. My body is definitely in recovery mode.

Finally my stuff came this afternoon, and I set up my room, but still have not got into the family stuff yet.

I am about half way through Abarat and am liking it. It is about girl who goes from Minnesota, a place called Chickentown, to a magical island kingdom where each island is stuck a certain hour of the day. The story moves quickly and does not dwell on details. I am not sure if I like it yet and I am almost halfway. That is how fast it moves. I will probably finish it in a couple of days. The doctor says if I do a little more each day I should be able to go back to college and maybe work some in a month or so. Meanwhile I will try to do some work on the family history which I just realized I have not even really started yet. Tomorrow I promise to start, scouts honor.

From the Bottom Branch #9

The View From Here

I am still too weak to explore my new neighborhood, but I have windows all around. One in my room looks out over a park with a broad field of green surrounded by some pine trees and broad spreading trees that look like oaks. The sky is low and gray but not raining. My father says that this is typical. By afternoon it should be sunny.

Tuesday my things should arrive and I will go to check in with my new doctor and work out a recovery plan. The next 2 days I will be resting. I have started reading a fantasy, Abarat by Clive Barker. It is entertaining. My father has a lot of work to catch up on in the next two days as he spent many days dealing with getting me here. So I will have to amuse myself with video games and such. I have a Wii and a couple of games and an old Xb0x with many games that my father’s friend loaned him for me. So I am on hold here and my life is once again slowed to a crawl. That’s all for now. Maybe I will tell you my thoughts on Abarat when I get a little more into it.

From the Bottom Branch #8

A Lot Can Change In 2 Weeks

I just read through my last post, which was 2 weeks and a lifetime ago. So much has happened. My life has been erased and sketched back in faint lines that I can barely make out. Here is a time line of events between January 6th and now.

1/7

I rode my bike to class in the cold and damp feeling exhausted and nauseas when I arrived which only got worse as the day went on. As I made my way to the library I collapsed while riding and hit my head and woke up in the hospital. I had only minor injuries, a concussion and some bruises but I was suffering from an acute infection and they found that my immune system was not functioning correctly.

1/8

I remained in the hospital unable to do schoolwork as I was physically drained. My mother came to see me. She told me that my father had contacted her and wanted to see me. She told him that I was in the hospital, and he said he would come tomorrow. It was a bit unnerving.

1/9

The doctor informed me that what was happening to my body was related to my previous illness, but was treatable. That after two weeks of rest, I would have to be very careful to get proper nutrition, exercise and keep stress to a minimum for up to six months along with taking medication in order to recover fully. I could do light work or maybe half time school but any more might cause a serious relapse from which I might not recover. Great!

My dad came to see me. We had a nice talk. He told me that he had quit drinking and straightened out most of his life, but that I was one person he had yet to make amends with. He was in AA and had a therapist both of which encouraged him to come and truly apologize and  connect in a meaningful way. He talked about some of the things that happened in my early years and about why he and my mother could not stay together. He took almost complete responsibility. I like my dad at least who he is now.

I called my mom and she verified what my father told me, and added that she too liked him now that he had made steps to be honest with himself and get help for his problems. She said that they had had some nice talks over the last few days, and really laid a lot of the old bad feelings to rest.

1/10

I phoned my teachers and explained my situation and talked to the office at the college they are giving me a leave of absence and incompletes in my coursework which I can make up later.

1/11

My father came to visit me again and invited me to come to Santa Cruz to live with him as I recover. He could afford to support me, and we could get to know each other. I told him I would consider it.

I talked with my mother. She encouraged me to take him up on the offer. She said Santa Cruz would be a nice place to recover and that it seemed that my father had truly made some significant changes in his life. She said that I should get to know my father. “He’s like the good parts version of the guy I fell in love with. All those problems just got in the way and finally drove us apart to the point that I couldn’t even have him in my life any more. It is like the problems, the drinking and controlling and cruelty, were symptoms of a disease he wasn’t dealing with.”

1/12

I told my father that I would come and live with him for a while and see how it went. He seemed truly happy and said, “I will make sure it works this time.”

1/13

I was released from the hospital and my mom took me to my house to get my things and we went to her house for a few days while my father made his place ready for me. I was still very weak and unable to do much.

1/16 My mother took me to the airport in Portland to fly down to San Fransisco so my father could pick me up and take me to his house. It was all a blur and I don’t remember much about any of that. I arrived at my fathers house at 10:00 at night. He lives in a condo near the ocean.

1/17-18

I slept most of the last 2 days. My room is nice here with a TV and video games and computer. It is still pretty blank. My father says we can go shopping for stuff or wait for my things to arrive. They are being shipped here and should arrive by Monday. Including all the family things that were shipped to me at the college. I figure one project I can continue is my family history. I am still interested in it and I can do it right here at home. My dad says I can use the university library as I can ride there with him when he goes to work, or I can stay at the house. He is really being so good to me. I can’t believe this is the man my mother could not even allow in our lives. I guess redemption is a real thing for some people.

From the Bottom Branch #7

A Phone Call From My Father/ The Snowball of Change

It has been a busy week, and I am just recovering some of my scattered ideas. The first thing that happened was that my father called and said that he had read my blog. My father never calls me. He has called me maybe 5 times in the last 5 years: on my sixteenth birthday, when I first went into the hospital about 2 years later, after my first surgery, and to tell me that he would help pay for college when I had recovered.
Well he called and said he had some letters and some boxes of things from his aunt’s estate that he could send me for my work, but that he would rather I didn’t use any real names as he had no idea what family members were still around who might not be happy about it. His father had many siblings who he lost track of. He was only close to his sister. He was the youngest of 10 and separated by many years from the others. His sister raised him, and he was closer to her than his parents. My grandfather died in 1990, and his sister a short while later. My father has had these papers in boxes for over 10 years and has not even looked at them. He is a mathmatician and a teacher, and not one to be overly sentimental about family, which I am sure he got from his father, who left home at a young age and never looked back. His sister finally tracked him down and renewed contact and became his only family connection and the only one my father ever knew from that side of the family.

My mom’s mother is my only living grandparent. I spent some of my childhood in her house in San Fransisco, which is interesting as my grandfather also spent time there in his childhood with his sister. All this I will write about later.

I have finished A Woman Warrior and will write my thoughts about that tomorrow as well as more on Look Homeward Angel.

In class we are discussing the early part of the 20th century, and I have been able to provide many points from Look Homeward Angel. Most of the discussion centers around how quickly things began to change at that point, that since 1900 almost all of peoples notions about the world have been questioned, and modern technology and culture have gone from laboratories and minds to some form of presence in everyday life. In the early 1900s there were still many places outside of large cities where Cars were never seen and there was no household phone service. There were many small towns with no electricity or indoor plumbing. Cities were islands of technology even in the most industrialized countries. Horses were a common form of transportation in small towns and rural places, and carriages were common in cities. For the most part highways did not exist. Most roads outside of cities were unpaved. Trains and steam ships were the fastest forms of transportation. There was no mass media that wasn’t printed on paper. Mental illnesses were being treated as demonic possession or simply tolerated as eccentricity, or people were locked away in asylums. People died from simple infections, and tuberculosis was common. Why did all of this change so rapidly? Was it that people saw the miracles of technology and started to look for more, and in that search found other marvels that fueled more curiosity. When did the snowball start rolling down the hill and what set it in motion.

The speed of the changes that occurred in the first half of century was blinding and has become even more of a blur in the last half. It seems as if somewhere along the way the technology has taken over and people are left hanging on for the ride. Seems like we have to take a look and see what changes are good for us and what needs to slow down. But who decides that? Right now it seems as if people have left it to big corporations to control what kind of world we live in. Kind of like letting greed have the steering wheel, but this is more philosophical and future oriented than I wanted to get here.

I will write more on what I find in my packages, as I still have not gotten to them yet. I will get to it today. Right now! And then I will write tomorrow.

From The Bottom Branch #6

Class Discussion and Mail

The package from my grandmother arrived in the mail this morning though I did not have a chance to read through anything yet. It looks fascinating: letters, postcards, family trees, a journal written by my uncle Elisha during the early 1900’s, another journal written by my aunt Ruth, and my grandmother even sent her childhood diary. She is always there for me.

My mom sent journals. They were on floppy disc, and my mother printed them out for me, as I don’t have the program to print them. She also sent me some letters she received as a girl from relatives and some journals from college and some things my father wrote to her. Thanks Mom! I should be able to put most of this to good use.

I went back to class today. Professor Donaldson said the blog was fine and that he did not want me to publish my papers on the blog just use it as a journal, question posing and writing things that excited or interested me.

We discussed some of the books we were reading, and I actually said quite a lot about Woman Warrior. It turns out that someone is reading Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali who comes from a culture of no name women and has become an activist. In this book she tells of her childhood growing up in many Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Her father was working to free Somalia from military dictatorship and had to move his family out of Somalia to many different countries each with its different culture and religious practices. This sounds interesting. It is too bad we all have to read different books the more I see about this book the more it interests me though I will have to restrict my reading to class materials maybe I will read it this summer. I just find it amazing that so many cultures control woman’s behavior as if they were less than human, and in so many different ways, some of them subtle, some overt and outrageous. In the U.S., the woman are held down in more subtle ways: lower wages, stereotypes, and lack of role models, while in many Islamic countries there are laws that prohibit women from walking around without a male escort, or without being covered. In the book, Infidel, she described how her mother could not leave the airport until some man could arrive to escort her out. Amazing that men could think that such treatment was not incredibly dehumanizing and wrong. I cannot believe that such medieval concepts have survived into the 21st century.

From The Bottom Branch #5

Is it History or Is it Journalism

I was just reading this blog, hair in the gate, and I was intrigued by the idea that anything after 1900 might be considered journalism and not history. To me history will always be the interpretation of evidence and journalism is just one piece of the evidence along with personal accounts, artifacts, and documents. Good journalism and good history should have one thing in common, objectivity. History I think is more combining many sources to get a complete picture of an event or time and place, whereas journalism is more angled to an audience. If you are writing for a political magazine, your slant on a country will be different than someone writing for a travel magazine. I am sure historians have angles too, but they have to give a more complete picture and show how their subject tie into other aspects and events going on at the same time. I think in the end the differences are more grey than black and white.

I have read the next chapter, Shaman, in Woman Warrior, and the book just gets more and more fascinating. The author relates stories that her mother told her about becoming a doctor/midwife in China at the beginning of the WWII. Her mother tells about ghosts and scientific methodology in the same story. She was able to study medicine because her husband was in America and her children were dead. She did not have Maxine until she was in the U.S.. the mother studied at a boarding school with many other woman and became a Doctor only to give up medicine completely when she rejoined her husband. This seems unfair and unpractical to waste such knowledge.

Hong Kingston also talks about the Chinese immigrants regarding white people literally as ghosts, somehow on a different plain of existence. They also describe white people as “barbarians.” This seems like a common occurrence when very different cultures interact with each other.

Again this chapter is a highly subjective and personal view of the time and people, but still provides interesting context and detail to other things I have studied about this time period.

Look Homeward Angel gets harder and harder to pick up. It is massive and weighs me down. He cannot just say something without going into it in depth and with details.

The main character is going through ideas of romantic love and sex and developing religious ideas. All kind of conflict, but somehow come together into romantic fantasies about relationships with women. It seems to me our society is still wrestling with these conflicts. I know I am. We are inundated with sexual messages every day and yet our president promotes abstinence based contraception. Children are sexualized by pop culture, and yet child pornography is held up as a heinous crime. Ideas and attitudes were similar when Thomas Wolf was growing up, just not spoken out loud or written down.

I am still waiting on my family history package from my grandmother and now my mother is sending me some old journals of mine she found in her stuff so I should have some good reference material soon to launch my personal/family history.

Last night was a loud messy thing, but I guess you have to expect that on New Years. Today has been quiet. Tomorrow classes start again. I am looking forward to classes. Is that too pathetic?

From The Bottom Branch #4

On Sleep Deprivation, Warrior Women, and Me

I am wiped out today as the house mates came back with a vengeance. I was done with most of my work and was able to have a few beers and catch up a little, but I am still not comfortable in loud party atmosphere. Within a couple of hours after they had all drifted in they had organized a party for last night. How do they do it? They seem to get all the school work done and yet have time every weekend to party.

I guess I can see this situation from a personal history perspective. I am like the immigrant outsider in this group. I am the only freshman, and everyone else has been living here at least 2 years. I don’t tend to fit in well as I was home schooled and raised on a small island by a mother who is a science nerd. I have also been recovering from a severe illness for the past 2 years and am just getting to where I feel like a real person. My father decided to ignore the fact that I was born. I know who he is, but my mother gave him the choice of whether to be a parent or not. She says its better to have parents who are there out of choice. He is helping to pay for my education now, but that’s about all I can expect. My mother also told me that he is an alcoholic. Wow! I am in a sucky mood. I didn’t sleep well and am not used to drinking at all.

I read the second chapter of Woman Warrior, and started notes on it, and I am about half way into Look Homeward Angel. Both books have taken strange turns. In Woman Warrior she is telling about how her mother taught her lessons by “talk story,” legends and myths about implacable swordswomen who would ride across China to avenge wrongs done to their families, and how she tries to reconcile these stories with her real life of being thought of as “a bad girl” because she expects some recognition for the things she does well in life, but only boys are praised and nurtured as worthwhile. “Feeding girls is like feeding cowbirds,” one man says in her presence and when she protest they call her a bad girl.

In the other story Eugene Gant’s parents expect him to work at the age of eight. He lives in a fantasy world to escape the dreary drudgery of his life. Both of his parents are aging and unhappy and his brothers and sisters are being tied to the family misery. But in all this there is an abundance of food and travel and openness to the world which is not available to poor non-white families who they despise and use as cheap labor. Death is a common occurrence that is accepted as a hardship. It is a very bleak picture, but rich in detail. I am actually learning a lot about life in the early 1900’s at least in South Carolina.

I am done for now and must sleep. I don’t know if I will be back tomorrow or Sunday. I have no idea what my house will be like this weekend, but I will probably be spending time in the library, even though it is closed. I work there and have a key.

From The Bottom Branch #3

No Name Women from Two Points of View

“Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?”

“A Woman Warrior” Maxine Hong Kingston

I am starting to take notes on A Woman Warrior, which is a fascinating book about a girl from a Chinese immigrant family growing up in California. The quote above is from the first chapter and kind of states how I am wrestling with what is the difference between historical and cultural context. One thing struck me: it seems as if when cultures collide that is historical or when cultures change dramatically, but I am not sure. I will bring it up in class next Wednesday and see what happens to it. We have lively discussions in this class, and my grade will be based on my participation in discussions. So far I have been a little shy, but I have resolved to speak up henceforth.

I digress.

Where was I? Oh yes The Woman Warrior. The first chapter is mainly about the mother telling the girl about the father’s sister who became pregnant in an adulterous affair, and since the husband was in America for years everyone knew the child wasn’t his. The village takes extreme measures on the night the child is born and the woman drowns herself in the well with the newborn child.

Kingston goes on to point out that the woman was probably just going along with some lusty man who knew the consequences and may even have taken part in the reprisals, but since he wasn’t pregnant. He wouldn’t be caught.

“His demand must have surprised, and then terrified her. She obeyed him; she always did as she was told.”

This seems to be the way it is in many cultures. Men have desires and women pay the price. Is this historical, probably more cultural, but I think when they move this culture to California, and it clashes with and blends with the dominant culture here, it becomes history. Probably the suicide and the story is family history, but only in so far as it instructs the girl in her duty to the family which seems cultural. The chapter is called No Name Woman as the father and his family will no longer acknowledge the existence of this poor woman. I think that the world is full of no name women who bear the brunt of these cultural double standards because they bear the children.

My mother called, and I asked her about how it was to grow up as a girl in California. She said, “I couldn’t wear pants to school or take shop classes. They also wouldn’t let me play the drums in the band, but things were changing pretty fast at that time. My little sister could have done all of those things.”

I am also reading “Look Homeward Angel” by Thomas Wolf, which is pretty much the opposite of Woman Warrior. He tells the story from the point of view of the oppressing man. In the first chapters Wolf tells the story of his father whose abuse and neglect lead to the death of his first wife and then he moves marries another woman and during bouts of drinking abuses her. Wolf describes all this on the background of the late 1800/early 1900’s. He gives a lot of details about life in a small southern town along with all the bigotry and class divisions. He is very honest about it all, which is useful. The book really shows how whites treated non-whites, men treated women, and fathers and mothers treated children, but again is this isolated culture or more broadly American or southern.

His style in the telling is also opposite that of Kingston. He throws in all kinds of unnecessary details and gives a clear picture of the chaos and confusion of life, whereas Kingston uses a very spare style and only gives you what you need to understand the exploration of her experience. The writing seems to reflect culture as well. I feel like telling Wolf to get to the point all ready and Kingston leaves me wanting a little more detail.

The main point I wanted to bring in from Wolf was that his fathers’ first wife is pretty much a no name woman, a throw away character without a face whose only purpose is to give the father a past. Why do women put up with these men? Is it how they are brought up? Why do men feel the need to control and dominate women? How has this changed over the years? I will keep reading and thinking. More on this tomorrow as I have other studies to ponder before the crowd returns which is anytime now.

From The Bottom Branch #2

The title of the class this project is connected with is Exploring History Through Literature and Personal Context. I am taking it to meet my Humanities requirement.

The specific assignment I chose out of many offered is to write a blog, with entries at least 5 times a week, commenting on concepts and discussions from class, sharing personal and family history, and with at least one example of each of these 3 items: a short piece of historically inspired fiction, an essay on family or witnessed history, and an entry about what I feel is my place in history.

I chose this assignment because:

1. I wanted to start a blog anyway

2. I get extra credit for this format, and I have to do the assignments listed above anyway.

3. My Mother is thrilled that she will get to see some of my schoolwork and show her friends. (Really Mom! You don’t have to tell anyone about this.) Well maybe this is a good reason for not doing the blog. Anyway my mother is thrilled about it.

Other things about the class:

I have to read 4 novels, that have historical implications and are written by someone who actually witnessed the events or lived in the time period of the novels. Two of these can be non-fiction memoir, journalistic, or diaries.

I am in the middle of A Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston and Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolf and will write a few things soon about these. There were a couple of other choices I looked at To Kill a Mockingbird and Dharma Bums. I also looked at Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, but I had already read them in High School and wanted to try some authors I hadn’t read. I also am interested in Edwidge Danticat and Nalo Hopkinson as choices that are more recent, but I am unsure of the historical implications of their work. Normally I read fantasy or things that make me laugh or a combination of the two if I can. But this is interesting too. If anyone else has any ideas of books with historical implications and a personal point of view I would appreciate some ideas. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison was also suggested by a friend of mine and sounds interesting. Oh, well lots of ideas are better than none.

I plan to include some letters, and other family documents as well as a family history, but I am waiting on a package, mailed by my grandmother over 2 weeks ago (book rate), containing some copies of family documents and some of her recollections and family stories. I plan to interview my mother, and other relatives as well, and write all that up. When I will do this I have no idea as I have 3 other classes and work in the library. This should be interesting not having a social life and a brain full of the past.

Well, I must get to my other homework before my house is full of people and noise.