Writing about working-class life also set me at odds with the dominant story of American democracy. “Class” is that nasty set of divisions the British adhere to, a hierarchy we Americans discarded in the Revolution. We have our rich and our poor at the extremes, and in between, a boundless middle class where most Americans, even many of the rich and poor, locate themselves. To describe and interpret working-class life, I first had to testify to its existence. The pretense that the United States is a classless society, or so fluid that everyone but the most abject failure surges upward, left me with no suitable vocabulary. Marxist rhetoric proved a poor fit. There is no consensus in American discourse about the meaning of the word “class” or about the conditions that determine who fits where. Yet even with no clear meaning, the very word “class” is potent and threatening. Democratic election campaigns have adopted the term “working families” to appeal to the party’s traditional labor base without feeding their Republican opponents’ charge that they are encouraging “class warfare.”
Meanwhile, the class structure in the United States is shifting and throwing the terms out of sync. College students assigned to read Packinghouse Daughter wonder why I use “working class” to describe families who own houses and cars. They equate the term with the “working poor,” and they are right. Families like mine, with hopes of mobility sustained by steady employment at union wages, are nearing extinction. My story misleads unless I allude to the reorganization of the meatpacking industry, the faster-paced and lower-paid work, the diminished strength of the unions, and the replacement of stable blue-collar communities with a mostly immigrant workforce that turns over frequently. While my personal story might be read as a typically American journey upward,8 the public story in Packinghouse Daughter fits the narrative of relentless decline. Cynicism lurks in its margins. Where should the reader look for hope?
Odd though it may seem, I take comfort in D. J. Waldie’s assertion that “every American place is a ruined paradise.” If we already know that to be true, we are no longer compelled to keep telling the story. Like the spate of memoirs about family dysfunction, dirges about the loss of the American dream no longer bear news. Memoirists and historians both are free to ask, So what? And now what?
Memoir, drawing on intimate, subjective experience, can deepen and complicate these dire public histories we acknowledge as true. Bill Holm’s essay “The Music of Failure” assumes we know the story of midwestern decline, then pokes at our acquiescence in it by showing us the Icelandic immigrant Bardal family—failures by all common measures—whose tiny, cramped house contains a massive library. “That house,” he writes, “was a metaphor for the interior life that they stocked with the greatest beauty and intelligence they understood.” Holm republished the essay in a memoir titled to make its message and its setting clear: The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth: Minneota, Minnesota.
I learned in an immigration history class how eagerly the second generation discards Old Country habits in order to become totally American. I still cheer the day I encountered Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, which showed me how fraught the vaunted assimilation process is with struggle and sorrow and poignant comedy and that it demands constant cross-cultural negotiation. Kingston’s Chinese American narrator helped me understand my Danish American mother, who refused to teach me the Danish language because it was ugly and useless. When I kept begging, she relented with two sentences: Jeg strøg idag. Jeg skal stryge i morgen. (“I ironed today. I will iron tomorrow.” The story of her life?) Years later, however, when I studied Danish on my own, she was pleased. My requests for vocabulary and idioms and correct pronunciations opened doors that had slammed shut in my ornery adolescence. I also learned that my family spoke an outdated lower-class dialect. Toward the end of her life, after Alzheimer’s had stolen her speech, I imagined that her mind had regressed to her childhood language. I spoke to her in Danish, and she laughed heartily.
The Woman Warrior was useful to me because I read it not as a private, exotic, Chinese story, but as a public, American one. Kingston, through her astute depiction of place, time, and culture, of a public context, had given me both options. Usefulness is, for me, a measure of a memoir’s value. I want my memoir, as well as those I read, to matter, to make some difference in the world. Personal accounts do have the capacity to inspire, and readers are drawn to the survival stories of people who have overcome illness, addiction, or abuse. Yet memoir has a greater capacity: to transform.
When I think of memoir as testimony, it is precisely this transformative end I have in mind. Testimony that is only self-revealing can be distancing and divisive. Given context, an examination of the public places that shape the experience revealed, it can help reconcile. A case in point is the personal literature on international adoption, a realm of experience that I have written about myself. A narrative of destitution and rescue and happy endings dominated the storytelling in the 1960s and 1970s. As rising infertility in Western industrial countries became the primary motive for adopting, the story changed to one of mutual need and fated love.9 A counternarrative has emerged in the last few years as a large population of primarily Korean adoptees has reached adulthood and begun to write personal accounts—some book-length memoirs,10 but also essays and poems that draw on memory.11 The story they tell is about abandonment, loss, grief, uncomprehending adoptive parents, confused racial identity, and complicated searches for birth family. Some tell that story with lyrical grace. Others slip into angry rants. It is a true story, propelled by genuine feelings, yet it puts adoptive parents and adoption agency personnel on the defensive. Some even refuse to read.
I have tried to introduce a different parental voice into the conversation that is neither the righteous rescuer nor the lucky, blessed mom of the standard narratives. While I write as an adoptive parent, I acknowledge the truth of the adoptee memoirs and interpret them in a way that I hope will encourage parents to listen. Only when we understand what is at stake for our children will we speak truthfully on our own behalf. I curtailed my attempt at a full-blown memoir, however, out of reluctance to expose my daughters’ privacy. I would like to find a voice that can speak of my own sorrows and hopes and vulnerabilities so distinctly that my daughters’ identities become immaterial. In the meantime, I write in a collective “we parents” voice that of course has limited validity. I look forward to a new paradigm in adoptive parents’ stories: a shift of focus from the cute, little objects of the quest to the parents’ deepest longings for family happiness.12
To become a transformative, reconciling force, the testimony of both adoptees and parents needs a public dimension. The adoptee memoirs tend to be highly personal, the story of “me,” often cast as victim. Assembled in an anthology, they acquire the force of group witness, but similarity is their only context. The parents’ stories are often glossy and naïve and treat international adoption as little more than a reproductive choice. I believe that a scrupulous examination of place—and international adoption is certainly an exotic place to inhabit—can lift the testimony out of the mire of hurt and shame. I await a memoir that takes care to set its story, whether of happy endings, perpetual sorrow, or lifelong negotiation, in a specific historical, geographical, and cultural space. Such a memoir might allude, for example, to social upheaval and sexual stigma in Korea and to rising infertility in the United States, to Korea’s rapid emergence from wartime destruction to high-tech modernity and to expanding globalization and multiculturalism in the United States, to Confucianism’s reverence for patrilineal bloodlines and to American individualism’s view of children as entitlement and source of fulfillment.
International adoption is a complicated, paradoxical story, and it grows more so as its setting moves from Korea to Colombia to Russia to China to Ethiopia on one end and from Australia to Sweden to the Netherlands to France on the other. The meaning that just one thoughtful, reflective adoptee or adoptive
parent can draw from life at this busy intersection of private and public might bring hope and reconciliation to others caught up in a confusing and often disturbing story. Not sociology, not economic history, not psychological research, but memoir, I believe, will deliver the news that matters most.
Delivering news is the point. Memoir introduces us readers to someone we may not know, but unless it also tells us something we could not imagine without the author’s testimony, we may not care. Decades ago I wrote a manuscript about my experience of chronic illness and sent it out, unsolicited, to publishers. It was my variant of the standard strength-in-adversity story, enriched, I thought, with self-ironic wit. One of the rejections read, “Maybe if you were somebody famous this would be interesting.” I was insulted. Was voyeurism the only motive for reading a personal account of illness? What about compassion, understanding, new knowledge? Later I was grateful for that rejection, and the others, as well. I would be embarrassed if that manuscript were available in print. Instead I had to start over and move beyond my private suffering toward shared space. Flannery O’Connor described sickness as “a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow,” but I found it well populated with others who felt as solitary and silenced as I had. I interviewed some of them about their experience with chronic illness and found emotional, social, and spiritual commonalities that my narrow inward gaze would never have revealed. Also, their trust in me left me with a new obligation, to dig deeper and be more truthful about my own life. I had to discover the news before I could tell it. And that story, it turned out, was interesting enough to publish, even coming from an unknown source.
Discovering the news is on my mind now, as I think about what’s next in my writing life. Testimony begins in obsession: Why does this topic or moment intrigue me? What can it possibly mean? My dad was a storyteller, and many of his stories were set on the farm in Moscow Township where he spent his first eleven years, the farm his great-grandparents had bought with a preemption claim in 1855 and that his parents lost in a farm recession. Turtle Creek, which ran through the farm just yards from the house, was a frequent site of his stories. He told me several times what happened when Rice Lake, a large marsh nearby, was drained into the Cedar River: how the dredge came along and reamed out Turtle Creek, how the water came flowing through so fast that the men scooped out fish with shovels and threw them onto the back of a truck. The stories were vivid memories. Much later, with a bit of research, I learned that Rice Lake was drained before my dad was born. He never knew Turtle Creek in its natural state. He never saw that truckload of fish. Yet his stories had the passion of testimony, and I believe they still bear witness to something important: Loss? Longing? Environmental destruction? Collective memory rooted in family and place? Since my dad’s death, I have become obsessed with the draining of Rice Lake. I never knew it as anything but a strikingly flat stretch of farmland, yet I know that something about that event, that place, and that time—the first decade of the twentieth century—still matters. Documents pertaining to the story have fallen into my hands. There is something I might testify about, some transformation I am invited to help achieve. I don’t know yet what the news will be, but the vehicle is likely to be memoir. My work is to enter that historical and geographical space to watch and listen. Unless a much easier project comes along and lures me away, you’ll find me there, under an uncertain sky.
1 James Wolcott, “Me, Myself, and I,” Vanity Fair, October 1997, 214.
2 Paul Gray, “Real Life Misery. Read All About It!” Time, April 21, 1997.
3 Diane Wilson, Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past (St. Paul: Borealis Books, 2006).
4 Cheri Register, “Are Those Kids Yours?”: American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries (New York: Free Press, 1991) and Beyond Good Intentions: A Mother Reflects on Raising Internationally Adopted Children (St. Paul: Yeong & Yeong Book Company, 2005).
5 Living with Chronic Illness: Days of Patience and Passion (New York: Free Press, 1987; Bantam Books, 1989) and The Chronic Illness Experience: Embracing the Imperfect Life (Center City, MN: Hazelden Publications, 1997).
6 Minnesota: A History of the Land, documentary, University of Minnesota College of Natural Resources and Twin Cities Public Television, 2005; Joseph A. Amato and John W. Meyer, The Decline of Rural Minnesota (Marshall, MN: Crossings Press, 1993); Richard O. Davies, David R. Pichaske, Joseph A. Amato, eds., introduction to A Place Called Home: Writings on the Midwestern Small Town (St. Paul: Borealis Books, 2003).
7 My knowledge of this trip comes not from family lore but from the public record, a county newspaper—an argument for using public documents to write memoir.
8 Packinghouse Daughter was published with only one typographical error. The designer accomplished a last-minute change in the font used for “UPWA,” the abbreviation for the United Packinghouse Workers of America, my dad’s union, with a quick find-and-change-all operation. Thus I am described in the text as “UPWArdly mobile,” a turn of fortune for which the UPWA certainly deserves credit.
9 Accounts by adoptive parents have been standard fare in Adoptive Families magazine since it began publication (as OURS Magazine) in 1968.
10 For example, see Katy Robinson, A Single Square Picture (New York: Berkley Books, 2002) and Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood (St. Paul: Borealis Books, 2003).
11 These are found in anthologies, including, for example, Tonya Bishoff and Jo Rankin, eds., Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology by Korean Adoptees (Glendale, CA: Pandal Press, 1997) and Susan Soon-Keum Cox, ed., Voices from Another Place: A Collection of Works from a Generation Born in Korea and Adopted to Other Countries (St. Paul: Yeong & Yeong Book Company, 1999). Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin, eds., Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006) includes essays that explore the context of adoption, as well as personal stories, and covers both domestic and international adoption.
12 A recent turn toward more candor is seen, for example, in Terra Trevor, Pushing Up the Sky: A Mother’s Story (El Dorado Hills, CA: Korean-American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network, 2006) and Theresa Reid, Two Little Girls: A Memoir of Adoption (New York: Berkley Books, 2006).
CARLOS EIRE
Where Falsehoods Dissolve: Memory as History
• • •
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
FROM Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
The world changed while I slept, and much to my surprise, no one had consulted me. That’s how it would always be from that day forward. Of course, that’s the way it had been all along. I just didn’t know it until that morning. Surprise upon surprise: some good, some evil, most somewhere in between. And always without my consent.
I was barely eight years old, and I had spent hours dreaming of childish things, as children do. My father, who vividly remembered his prior incarnation as King Louis XVI of France, probably dreamt of costume balls, mobs, and guillotines. My mother, who had a memory of having been Marie Antoinette, couldn’t have shared in his dreams. Maybe she dreamt of hibiscus blossoms and fine silk. Maybe she dreamt of angels, as she always encouraged me to do. “Sueña con los angelitos,” she would say: Dream of little angels. The fact that they were little meant they were too cute to be fallen angels.
Devils can never be cute.
The tropical sun knifed through the gaps in the wooden shutters, as always, extending in narrow shafts of light above my bed, revealing entire galaxies of swirling dust specks. I stared at the dust, as always, rapt. I don’t remember getting out of bed. But I do remember walking into my parents’ bedroom. Their shutters were open and the room was flooded with light. As always, my father was putting on his trousers over his shoes. He always put on his socks and shoes first, and then his trousers. For years I tried to dupli
cate that nearly magical feat, with little success. The cuffs of my pants would always get stuck on my shoes and no amount of tugging could free them. More that once I risked an eternity in hell and spit out swear words. I had no idea that if your pants are baggy enough, you can slide them over anything, even snowshoes.
As he slid his baggy trousers over his brown wingtip shoes, effortlessly, Louis XVI broke the news to me: “Batista is gone. He flew out of Havana early this morning. It looks like the rebels have won.”
“You lie,” I said.
“No, I swear, it’s true,” he replied.
Marie Antoinette, my mother, assured me it was true as she applied lipstick, seated at her vanity table. It was a beautiful piece of mahogany furniture with three mirrors: one flat against the wall and two on either side of that, hinged so that their angles could be changed at will. I used to turn the sided mirrors so they would face each other and create infinite regressions of one another. Sometimes I would peer in and plunge into infinity.
“You’d better stay indoors today,” my mother said. “God knows what could happen. Don’t even stick your head out the door.” Maybe she, too, had dreamt of guillotines after all? Or maybe it was just sensible, motherly advice. Perhaps she knew that the heads of the elites don’t usually fare well on the street when revolutions triumph, not even when the heads belong to children.
Tell Me True Page 16
