“Do you remember when we left Hawaii after dad died and moved to the family home in Kyoto?” my youngest aunt would say, referring to the brusque relocation of the three sisters and their mother immediately after their father died of a massive stroke four years before the war began.

They thought they were going home, but found themselves caught between two conflicting worlds. “Japanese soldiers would harass us at every train stop,” my aunt recalled, “taking away our rations because we were American, so we discovered how good the roots of weeds and grasshoppers were when we cooked them in shoyu and oil.”

“Yes, but the soldiers didn’t last long,” my mother would correct her, “all of them were sent to war—even the old men and young boys—except for those annoying intelligence officers who kept interrogating us. Food was gone, too. That’s why mother went to the family temple in Fukui where there was rice.”

“You two were so selfish then,” my oldest aunt would tell her sisters, “but you were young. After our sad dinners, I’d be upstairs and you thought I was asleep. You’d hide a small piece of mochi or nori and you’d grill it over the charcoal that kept the house warm. You didn’t realize the smell of any food woke the rest of us up, and we would hear you trying to be so sneaky … bad girls!” This would send them into gales of laughter.

The stories would cycle again and again, I would sit with my mom and her sisters at the light green Formica dining table, surrounded by banana trees and their lilting voices and laughter, feeling privileged to be a part of their closed group, rapt at each retelling. I’d use each of these times with my aunts and mother, by then in their 40s, to color a fuller picture of the Imamura family history—of lives torn apart and torn between homes, between identities, and between the two sides of the vast Pacific. Their oldest brother, a Buddhist bishop sent to California to start a temple and an institute for Buddhist Studies, would later help communities of other internees resettle into a country that had distrusted them, imprisoned them, and allowed their businesses and farms to be taken; the second brother, a Harvard graduate, married into a wealthy Japanese family (which meant taking their name) and helped lead their kimono factories before working as an interpreter in a U.S. consulate after the war. Their youngest brother, a Keio University graduate whose dream job as a political reporter for the Mainichi News transformed into an embedded war correspondent with the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia, would later focus on U.S.-Japan relations in his reporting and would build ties between the countries through his support of professional baseball.

Author’s mom and younger aunt who identified as Hawaii-born Japanese Americans. Photo circa 1930s.

 
The three sisters, for their part, worked in the English-language section of a women’s university library, keeping their bilingual skills up so that they would be ready to act as translators and coordinators for the Occupation of Japan, accompanying rising Japanese political leaders to the U.S. to be trained in the ways of democracy. Across their different careers, the Imamura siblings were all encouraged by their father to be the Bridge People: connectors fluent in the history, language, culture, and values of both nations, whose skills and perspectives made their roles connecting Japanese and American worlds both inescapable and honorable.

Though the laughter of my mom and aunts’ after-dinner conversations fills my memory, I remember just as well when they’d go quiet.

A hush would fall as my mom recounted how, as a high school student in Kyoto, she sat in her university class listening to the school intercom announcement of the Japanese offensive on a U.S. Pacific naval base.

“When I heard they had attacked Pearl Harbor,” she’d say, “I started to cry because that was my home. Through my tears I felt all of these eyes slowly turn towards me. I was American. They all suddenly realized it.”

The sisters’ cadence would also slow as they spoke of their eldest brother, Kanmo, painting the picture of a scholarly, quiet, and handsome man—the 18th generation member of our family to become a Buddhist bishop. His life, they would reflect, was the hardest from the beginning. Kanmo was born in Hawaii, but sent back to Japan when he was four years old to be raised as a bishop. His childhood was a lonely life at the temple without the family: tutored by priests and a step-grandmother who was distant and cold. He would tell me, years later, how he would walk alone between the temple and the house in the winter, the Sea of Japan’s cold air blowing through his priestly robes, wondering why he couldn’t be in Hawaii with his family. He would return to Hawaii to be the priest at the largest plantation temple in Wahiawa, and would realize his father’s dream of growing a temple and study center in California to support the Japanese community there.

Just as Kanmo started to expand the temple programs, the war began. Soon he found himself supporting Japanese-American families in the internment camps, helping those forced away from their homes over unfounded allegations of conflicting allegiances (especially ironic for those who had sons proving their loyalty with blood and body in 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe, a battalion where young Japanese-Americans prominently served). Three of my uncle’s children would be born in the sand-filled winds of the Gila River internment camp. At the end of the war, he saw his mission as providing shelter, food, dignity, and spiritual support to those released from the camps, often with nothing more than a train ticket and $30 in their pocket, to reclaim the businesses and farms taken from them. He would spend the rest of his life building interfaith study centers and programs for the disenfranchised, and returned to his birthplace to become the Bishop of the Headquarters of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temples of Hawaii.

Author’s oldest uncle with his wife and first child at the Gila River Internment Camp.

 
The sisters spoke with reverence for their middle brother, Shinshi, too. The hard-working Harvard graduate, had dreams of working for the American government. His hopes were dashed—as fate would have it, he was the only of the siblings not born in Hawaii, and his Japanese birth disqualified him from service. His ambition took him elsewhere though— Shinshi would become the head of General Motors in Japan, another form of bridge-building.

The youngest brother, Tokushi, a basketball prodigy in his school days in Hawaii, had an improbable gig straight out of college: he was an American reporter embedded with the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma and Shanghai. Tokushi would go on to become the political editor for the Tokyo-based Mainichi Shimbun, one of the top newspapers in the country. But he didn’t forget his American roots, and spent his free time doing such things as recruiting Japanese-American baseball stars like Wally Yonamine for Japanese teams or coordinating a trip for Helen Keller, the first U.S. Goodwill Ambassador sent to Japan after the war. The bilingual jokester also managed to stay friends with his McKinley High School pals in Hawaii, and somehow remained the quintessential “local boy” among them, despite the miles that separated them. I still remember the bright energy that would fill the room whenever my aunts and mother spoke of him.

I knew the night was winding down when the sisters would turn to talk of their mother, a Buddhist bishop’s wife who herself came from a long line of bishops and abbots, poets and publishers, and military rulers from a Shogunate that rose in the 14th century and waned by the 17th.

“Do you remember her practicing for the citizenship test when we were growing up in Hawaii, memorizing the entire Emancipation Proclamation?” my oldest aunt would start, “It was so funny to hear her pronounce ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ and to hear her recite ‘…all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.’”

“Her favorite movie scene was in Gone With The Wind,” my oldest aunt would recount, “and Scarlett’s defiance when she says, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”

In Japan at the end of the war but desperate to return to Hawaii with her children, grandmother Kiyo Imamura made her way back to Hawaii—“the birthplace of the ‘Bridge People,’” as she called it—to end her journey.

My family is not alone, of course. All second-generation Americans reconcile the norms and values of their family’s culture and of American culture, to the enhancement of each one. Such bridge-building replenishes and enriches our national fabric, reminding us of the universal relevance of our core values and adding texture to the American story. In Hawaii, where the host culture of Native Hawaiians accepted waves of immigrants through interracial marriage and linguistic and religious tolerance, cultural bridge-building is practically the state’s mission statement. Hawaii may seem far away from the mainland, but it couldn’t be closer to the American understanding of how diversity creates strength and unity.

The post In Hawaii, an Immigrant Family that Bridged Japanese and American Worlds appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I am an immigrant from Vietnam. I left the land of my birth in 1978—just shy of my first birthday—and arrived in the U.S. a few weeks after I turned two. All of us on that boat, and hundreds of thousands of others, fled for the same reason: to escape the oppression of the communist regime. It took us more than one full year to arrive in the United States, most of that time spent on an over-packed freightship smuggling 2,300 other refugees on a cargo hull full of festering flour and one functioning restroom.

Like many ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, my family members were merchants. My maternal grandma, who had fled to Vietnam from British-held Hong Kong as a teen to escape the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, had a fabric stall at Saigon’s Ben Thanh Market. My dad had a factory that manufactured shampoo and detergent. After the Vietnam War officially ended in April of 1975 with the fall of Southern Vietnam to the Northern Vietnamese communists, the new regime stripped our family of its livelihood, confiscating our family businesses and much of our savings. They also introduced a series of new currencies—each time capping the sum families were permitted to exchange. Anyone found with more was punished, the money confiscated.

Years later, my grandma would tell of counting her life savings, exchanging the maximum allowed, and burning the remainder. She described watching her tears fall into the flames as the money burned; just burning and crying, because what else was there to do?

Early in 1977, the year before we fled Vietnam, my mom was six months pregnant with me and my father was in jail for “unpatriotic acts” after commissioning the building of a small junk boat he’d hoped to use for our escape. My mom visited my dad in his cell so he could help name me. He must have had money on his mind, as my name translated means Gold and Jade.

Fellow refugees transfer a Vietnamese child onto a Coast Guard boat in Manila, Philippines on Jan. 8, 1979.

My grandfather had just passed away, but my maternal grandma still had five kids at home to raise. She was 4’9” on a tall day and a breadwinning matriarch before her time. She negotiated an escape route for us on that Panamanian freightship, but it would come at a steep cost.

There were 19 of us in total in my nuclear and extended family. Passage on the ship was purchased through luong, 1.2-ounce, 24-karat gold bars. All told, 154 luong—more than $135,000 in today’s dollars—were required to smuggle my family out of Vietnam. Those bars were the culmination of a lifetime of work, coated with love and stamped with faith, molded into 24 karats of black market gold. Which is how we found ourselves part of the mass exodus that would come to be known as the “Vietnamese Boat People.”

After being denied entry at the ports of Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Brunei for temporary asylum, we floated aimlessly at sea, waiting. My mom watched over my two-year-old brother and me while we all sat atop a two-foot by two-foot table. Another family lived in a permanent crouch underneath. All around us, families staked their claim to plots of floor, sleeping upright, backs propping up backs. If someone needed to do their business or go in search of food, family members would stand vigil over the hard-won territory. Somehow, even as we were reduced to human freight, the framework of family held, in the form of “Go shit, I got your back.”

Eventually our freighter docked in the Philippines, but we were not allowed to disembark—all of the existing camps were full. After a full 10 months at sea we were finally transferred to a makeshift refugee camp on a Philippine island. My mom set me on the ground to roam and was pleased to discover that I could run.

At the camp, my parents and extended family underwent an arduous vetting process including background checks and physical screenings with blood tests. Then came the search for a sponsoring country. A refugee who could claim a relative in another country was given priority there. Barring that, where you wound up was a crapshoot by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.

My parents, my brother, and I lingered in this system for several months until a church group in Minnesota agreed to sponsor us. In one fell swoop, we were whisked from the humidity of the tropics to the sub-zero temperatures of a midwestern December. The commitment and logistics of sponsoring and providing for a refugee family are significant, so the church group shared the responsibilities for clothing, sheltering, and integrating us into American life. One group of volunteers met us at the airport with donated second-hand winter jackets. Other volunteers helped us find and furnish a small two-bedroom home in the suburbs, while still others worked on getting sponsorship for the rest of our family, until all 19 of us were re-united.

Our family also relied on public social programs as we adjusted and assimilated into American society. My parents enrolled my brother and me in a Head Start preschool while they studied English, passed the GED, and took job-training classes. For a year or so, we lived on welfare and food stamps, supplemented by baffling 10-pound blocks of bright orange government cheese.

Within two years, my mom spoke English well enough to take a job in a bank, the start of a 30-year career that became our modest family livelihood. When it came time for my brother and me to think about college, we benefitted from the expectation of our family that we would go. We had as role models close relatives who had recently graduated. But we also relied on programs like need-based grants, low-interest loans, and work-study programs.

We hear so much talk about individual resilience, self-reliance, and the proverbial bootstraps being the ingredients of the American Dream, and I’d like to think my family exhibited those traits in our extraordinary journey. But there is a lot more that goes into the American Dream’s promise of providing people an opportunity to improve their lives and to contribute to this great nation. Nothing exists in a vacuum, after all, and certainly not opportunity. We all rely on the springboard provided by our extended families, our communities (like those Minnesota church volunteers who made our American story possible) and, yes, government-backed immigration policies and programs like those that let us enter, fed us, and then helped us obtain an education.

Now, more than three decades and a generation after we fled Vietnam, my youngest child has just turned two—the age I was when I arrived in the U.S. Her first words? “Milk,” “mama,” and “dada.”

The post In My Family’s American Dream, Bootstraps Met Blocks of Government Cheese appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’re at a Dodger game and I’ve decided to just mumble that part of the national anthem. I see it as a victory that I don’t have to look at the Jumbotron for most of the lyrics, though my ignorance might shock or offend many Americans. How does an 18-year-old, born and raised right here in California, not know the entire “Star-Spangled Banner”?

That was two years ago. While I have since learned that it is perilous fight, I still don’t know the Pledge of Allegiance or the words to “God Bless America.” My knowledge of American history does not extend past the American Revolution.

But I’m not poorly educated. I go to an Ivy League school. And there are things I know that you do not. I can list all the regions of France (the past 22, not the newly condensed 13) and can sing countless German Christmas carols and nursery rhymes. I know all the words to “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France, as well as the significance of their national symbols, including La Marianne and the Gallic rooster. I can recite German folk tales, prayers, and poems. I also know the names of all of the French presidents and which Republic they were a part of (there were quite a few false starts), beginning with Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon’s nephew and an eventual emperor himself. I speak French and German fluently.

I’m not a French citizen (although I do know the process one must undergo to become one) and have no French heritage, and I was educated in Los Angeles. But in French. My elementary, middle, and high school, Lyceé International de Los Angeles (LILA), taught almost all of its classes in French. At the start of fifth grade, I distinctly remember counting how many hours of French I had a week: 12. That’s not including Art, P.E., or Math, which were also all taught in the language. By comparison, I only had six hours of English.

Jones (far right) on a school field trip with LILA to the Griffith Park Observatory.

My relationship to German is the opposite. I’ve never taken a German class, but my mother and her relatives are German, and much of my large extended family still lives in Germany (our last family reunion took place in Kiel, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and boasted 98 attendees). It is for this reason that German is my first language and I spoke it exclusively to my mother until I was 12. She refused to respond if I spoke to her in English, to ensure that I learned the language well and wouldn’t forget it when I grew up.

This determination is also why she sent me to French school. Not only did she believe that the French educational system was the best in the world, but also that an immersion school would guarantee I became fluent in yet another language.

It wasn’t until my brother and I were in the car with her, en route to our kindergarten interview, that my mother informed us that the school taught its classes in French. Despite not having any say in the matter, we were, apparently, unfazed. Another language, why not?

Indeed, I am grateful for my trilingual upbringing; it has enabled me to look at things from different angles and it has enriched my understanding of the world. But it also gave me a cultural affliction: I am an American whose entire perspective was shaped by a German heritage and a French education. Because of this layered detachment from the U.S., I’ve become a foreigner who is not remotely foreign.

I never joined the Girl Scouts or had a lemonade stand (although the latter may have more to do with my heavily trafficked Los Angeles street than my curious upbringing). I played soccer as a child, but I didn’t know the rules of American football until this year. The bedtime prayer I’d learned as a child was in German and told the story of 14 angels who protected me by standing at various places around my bed. I did listen to the Harry Potter books on tape in the car when I was little, and I did see one of the more recent Batman movies, but in both cases they were translated into German.

At my International Lycée (a term which refers to a secondary school that follows the French curriculum), where exotic nationalities were rampant, I was known as “the German kid. ” On one level that made sense—I speak German like a native and am well-versed in traditional songs and fairytales. But as a practical matter it was a stretch. I don’t know all that much about the German government or everyday life there, and—family reunions aside—my connections to the actual nation are minimal.

Jones (left) wearing a LILA t-shirt with a friend.

My knowledge of, and affection for, France, on the other hand, is borderline excessive. At the moment all I can think about is how this current U.S. election mirrors the French 2002 presidential election, and the ways in which Donald Trump resembles Jean Marie LePen. And when I recently read an article on “laïcité”, the oft-criticized French practice of imposed secularism, my thoughts immediately went to how endearing I find the policy. Rather than viewing it as an attack on religious freedom, I see it as a holdover from the French Revolution. In 1799 the French were doing everything in their power to separate themselves from the monarchy; they went so far as to invent their own calendar! Laïcité is their way of fighting against a tradition of religion used as force. It is the French trying to maintain equality, all these years later.

Sometimes I blurt out words like “flou” and “pechvogel”, which roughly translate to “imprecise and vague” and “someone who attracts bad luck”, respectively. I use them not because I’m trying to be pretentious, but because they express sentiments for which I have not found precise English translations.

This isn’t to say that I don’t love the English language; it’s actually my chosen college major. I also don’t dislike America, and I love California and Los Angeles. L.A. is a mixture of bewitching glamour and harsh reality, and I am lucky to have grown up here. But, on its own, it’s not home.

Truthfully, I’m a little lost. As I grew up my languages and my worlds became jumbled, and as a result I no longer fit into any of them. I’m not German enough to be German, I’m not French enough to be French, and I’m not American enough to be American. I have lived in the same L.A. home since I was two, but I didn’t speak English until I was at least three. My childhood was so filled with German that I dreamt in the language, but I know little about the realities of the nation. I have an American accent when I speak French, and of these three countries I have spent the least amount of time in France, but I know the most about its origins, politics and society.

Sometimes I wish I had a more clear-cut connection to a single place and culture. There is safety in having a true home. A place that, however boring or fast-paced, you know like the back of your hand, an expression, which, interestingly, has no direct translation into German or French. The closest you can get is “wie deine Westentasche,” or “comme le fond de ta poche,” which both roughly translate into knowing something like the inside of your pocket.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I don’t have this exact relationship with a place, and that I may never. I need more than a place to feel whole. Los Angeles is only truly home when I’m with friends from my French school community laughing about Louis XV. When my mother makes bratkartoffeln and tells me about the German mystery that she’s reading. Or when I go to a small French restaurant in L.A. with my family on Bastille Day and we speak German the whole time. This I know, like the inside of my pocket.

The post When Being Home Means Speaking German on Bastille Day in a Los Angeles Bistro appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I took his words to heart, and have never let them go.

I have never let South L.A. go either. I grew up in the middle of the Crenshaw-Baldwin Hills-Jefferson Park area, otherwise known as Black Los Angeles, a place that punched way above its weight as a center of black life in the United States at the time. Often when whites write (sometimes to great critical success) about Black L.A., they describe it as the sum total of its self-inflicted pathologies, rarely seeing the beauty of the particularity of life there or the complex intersection of class and intraracial conflict.

Sure, I got my ass kicked, and occasionally guns we’re pointed in my direction, but that could happen anywhere in the city of angels. The Black L.A. I grew up in is a moveable feast of memory.

My memories of growing up in Black L.A. are trips to Playa Del Rey beach and Griffith Park. My dad worked nights at the post office, and so he would take me and the neighborhood boys and girls all about the city on a regular basis. It was a one-man Boys and Girls Club. I’ve written many stories about Googie and Onla and the other knuckleheads I hung out with. I still think about the polite criminality and comic mayhem before rock cocaine came to town like an ill wind that kind of ethnically cleansed black folks who fled to the high desert or back to Texas, Louisiana, or Mississippi.

I remember going shopping with my mom at the Boy’s Market on Crenshaw when Crenshaw was still Japanese. And I remember hanging out in the magazine and book section and being terrified by Alfred Hitchcock short stories. Later I discovered that Japanese magazines had naked women in them but no one seemed to notice my 10-year-old self panting with excitement.

The nearby Holiday Bowl bowling alley was probably the only place in the world where you could get sashimi, hot links, grits, and donburi under the same roof. I was lucky to live on the edge of everything—the shining affluence of Baldwin Hills and close enough to the heat of working class neighborhoods. In 1964 we moved to a neighborhood of New Orleans expatriates, and I attended Holy Name of Jesus Christ Catholic Church on Jefferson. I attended their elementary school for just one year because a nun there decided that I was mildly retarded. My mother threatened to rip the veil off of the nun and I was sent to a public school to study with the heathens.

Jervey Tervalon, left, with a friend.

Long before Beyoncé, we were ensconced in celebrity culture in that South L.A. sightings of Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Richard Pryor weren’t uncommon, and Jim Brown was known to crash a party. Who didn’t know someone who danced on Soul Train? Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his father on Fourth Avenue, walking distance from my house. And Jim Kelly, of Enter the Dragon fame, courted a lady on my block, though my friends and I would barely look in his direction because we thought he might round house kick our little pootbutts.

If you hung around long enough you’d end up in a movie, like my older brother who had a moment of fleeting fame in The Spook Who Sat by the Door. A casting director found him and his buddy in the unemployment line and needed some “high yellow niggers” for a few scenes for an important and complicated plot point involving passing as white and a bank robbery. My mom even sewed my brother’s dashiki for authenticity’s sake.

I had my distinctly out-to-lunch buddies; we carried staffs and wore flowers in our hair and, like Kwai Chang Caine meets afro hippies, we walked barefoot—and talked about science fiction and the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft incessantly. Perhaps not everyone is up on Afro-Futurism—that school of thought that values black speculative fiction as a necessary means to understand our current and past situations (though I think we thought of it as Afro-Presentism). Understanding white privilege in its myriad forms should be something you can get a Ph.D. in.

I had a great liberal arts education once I got to college, studying with the literary critic Marvin Mudrick—who understood that being raised in a real neighborhood meant you sometimes got beat up. My formal education meshed well with the idiosyncratic education I had before. Mudrick’s love of Chaucer became mine, and my love of Richard Pryor became his admiration. It’s the crazy complicated formula of one’s birth culture and its intersection with whiteness/European-ness and all the variations plus the breadth of one’s reading and interests. That’s how I thought of myself growing up weird ass Jervey, that dude who reads a lot and writes.

I also flew model rockets, studied martial arts, and loved science. I worshiped fan-boy culture: Dracula above all else, science fiction and Lord of the Rings, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Ishmael Reed’s “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” Canterbury Tales, and millions of comics.

Later, when I did more traditional study of literature, my love for reading everything served me well. The canon couldn’t harm me or make me feel like an alien in my own skin—I took what was useful to me and ignored the rest.

I became a writer and teacher. Now, after teaching for over 30 years at almost every level of schooling, at some of the poorest and some of the most prestigious colleges and universities in Southern California, I’ve learned this: every teacher who ever meant something to me was passionate about his or her area of expertise, was generous of spirit, was honest, and made things.

It is hard to quantify these things, the metrics of creativity, but creativity and creative schooling can happen anywhere. Good, enthusiastic instruction. Decently paid, respected teachers. Students who feel respected and challenged. And a reasonable school environment. These are the essentials, but one can make do.

When I go back to South L.A., I teach junior high and high school students at USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative Saturday Academy. The academy is one of the enhancements NAI offers the kids in its seven-year program to prepare low-income students for college. (Those who meet USC’s admissions requirements get a full financial aid package). These are kids of color who can get into elite schools because NAI creates the kind of advantages an affluent kid has.

I’m glad for my uneven and even perilous inner city education—it made a reader and writer out of me. And so I do my best to entice NAI students to be passionate writers and readers. I flatter the ones who rise to the challenge and admonish the ones who don’t, even if they’re killing it in STEM courses. NAI and my organization, Literature For Life, give a $1,000 prize to the ninth grader who writes the best short story at a USC community school; we want to expand it to all public schools in L.A.

Too often these days we test kids like lab rats and torture teachers to achieve results that justify their jobs. I think of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” and the power of saying “I would prefer not to.” I will not participate in a process that makes it impossible for a teacher to generate passion in students for reading, that values teaching to a test over the possibility of working to engage students in creative construction. STEM is necessary but so is reading widely and deeply. I want these kids to know the pleasure of reading Kafka and then being shocked that when they’re in biology, they remember The Metamorphosis and wonder about the nature of existence.

These Latino and African-American kids remind me of myself when I was in school, which happens to be the same school—Foshay—that I attended back when Foshay was a junior high and a tough place to be a student. Now Foshay is a K-12 school that produces students who get into USC, the UCs, Stanford, and Harvard. Many of them are the first generation in their families that will go on to college, and they look like me, and many of them are confident in their intelligence and wit.

They are their own weird-ass selves.

The post A South L.A. Novelist on Why He Teaches Kids It’s OK to Be Weird appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I spent the first 18 years of my life in a town of 400 people in central Minnesota. When people ask the name of the town, I say, “You wouldn’t know the name, but if you’ve driven along the interstate from the Twin Cities to Fargo-Moorhead, stopping halfway to fish, you’ve been to my town. In fact, you might have purchased fishing gear at my parents’ hardware store.” It was in this hardware store that I, a shy child prone to eavesdropping, first studied the language of emotional restraint: listening to the way people talked, to where they paused and for how long, to what they said and—more telling—to what they did not say.

All of these factors—where I come from and my desire to make sense of this place on the page—make me a Minnesota writer, as I discovered again with my second book, a novel set both in San Francisco, where I live today, and in a town in Minnesota like the one in which I grew up. Near the end of the novel, the main character’s father, in a fit of rage, empties the contents of the family’s refrigerator onto the floor. The father is a police officer, and the mother, who grew up on a farm, worked for the electric company until they got married. They are of this place, so when I opened their refrigerator in my mind and then described on the page what I saw, of course there was leftover hotdish.

Hotdish is what most of the country calls casserole, and Minnesotans eat it regularly and with gusto. It consists of three ingredients: some sort of carbohydrate, meat (usually ground beef), and vegetable (string beans, carrots, peas—and yes, canned is fine, even preferred). Finally, a can of cream of mushroom soup is used to bind, moisturize, and mingle the flavors. Particularly popular is Tater Tot hotdish, which Minnesotans claim to have invented. (I’m fairly sure that this claim has gone largely unchallenged.)

Hotdish is a tribute to Minnesotan practicality: easy to make and clean up after, easy to transport. Ease of transportation is essential. While it’s true that hotdish is part of everyday life—filling and accommodating of the Protestant work ethic, with its emphasis on no-fuss meals (because everyone is busy working)—it is also a mainstay of community events, served at funerals and church potlucks, as well as post-Memorial Day parade luncheons.

My novel’s manuscript went off to a copyeditor, who, in the margin next to the scene where hotdish is flung from the refrigerator, wrote the following: “Do you mean that the dish is hot?” I understood her confusion. I had spelled it as two words, “hot dish.” There she was in New York trying to figure out how a dish could be pulled from a refrigerator, hot. I considered my options: I could go with the more universal word casserole, but I felt that in making this simple word substitution, I would lose not just the essence of the place but some degree of credibility, if only among other Minnesotans.

I turned to Facebook, crowdsourcing these two simple questions: Do you know what hotdish is? Do you spell it as one word or two? The first response, from a writer whose memoir had discussed the pervasive silence of growing up in that part of the country, offered this basic definition: “Ummm. Church-basement-post-funeral goodness.” Another response, from my college roommate who now lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, expressed shock that anyone would not know what hotdish was: “Seriously? I make hotdish every week. One word. That’s my final answer.”

In total, 106 people responded to this Facebook post, many, though not all, from the Midwest, some responding to my question, others asking new questions. A poster in Indiana asked about the grammar of the word: “You don’t use the article with ‘hot dish,’ right? You make ‘hot dish,’ not ‘a hot dish’?” Because I no longer eat, make, or discuss hotdish on a daily basis, I found myself struggling to remember, but my high school English teacher quickly responded: “Minnesotans eat ‘hotdish.’ I serve either ‘hotdish’ or ‘a hotdish.’”

Ultimately, instead of casserole, I chose to stick with “hotdish,” changing the spelling to one word. In the margin next to the copy editor’s question, I defended the spelling change as well as the word itself by linking to a page from Senator Al Franken’s website for the Annual Minnesota Congressional Delegation Hotdish Off, a competition that replaces party politics with hotdish. This event seems uniquely Minnesotan to me, at once naïve and hopeful, its success determined by both individual and collective abilities to be polite and restrained, to sublimate partisan anger into the preparation of an agreed-upon state food.

I spent several years working toward a career in academia, engaged in the sort of critical analysis and textual parsing that would have had me discussing hotdish as a metaphor of community mingling, ingredients coming together to create a pragmatic citizenry where individual differences are buried beneath a blanket of cream of mushroom soup. This is the type of intellectual exercise that would make Minnesotans laugh uncomfortably, but with a sense of superiority that they would never state directly. The unstated would go something like this: “While you sat around thinking about something as useless as how hotdish symbolizes the Minnesotan sense of self, I made an actual hotdish for supper.” In any case, I gave up on academia long ago, and these days, I use the word casserole, having adapted to the world in which I live, where casserole conveys meaning.

My characters, however, continue to eat hotdish, just as they drink pop rather than soda, and refer to the final meal of the day as supper. In one of my stories, “Talking Fowl with My Father,” the narrator goes home to care for her sick father, a man similar to my own, who is determined not to change in order to accommodate the world. When the narrator calls him to the table, announcing that dinner is ready, he does not come, and when she finally goes to check on him, asking, “Didn’t you hear me calling you for dinner?” he says that he did hear, adding, “But in this house, we eat dinner at noon. If you want me to come for supper, you’ll need to say so.”

In another story, the narrator returns to the town where she grew up to help her mother in the wake of her father’s death. Her father, incontinent at the end, had kept soda bottles near the bed, which he urinated into during the night. She begins gathering them up, noting: “My mother watched, insisting that I call them pop bottles. She thought I was saying soda on purpose, to bother her. She said that there was no way a person could say pop for years and then find herself one day thinking soda.”

Though both stories are fiction, I have spent the last half of my life—that is, the years I have lived away from Minnesota—having such conversations with my parents, who are distrustful of the fact that I have lost my Minnesota accent, which mysteriously disappeared in my mid-20s. “I don’t understand your brogue,” my aunt said when we saw each other for the first time after many years, as if I had become Irish. They regard accent and word choice as proof of belonging, and conversely, my loss of these cultural and geographical markers as proof that I no longer choose to belong. Of course, there is a deeper conversation here, one that we will never have, for doing so would require us to learn new rules of communication. Instead, we will continue to rely on subtext, talking about pop versus soda in order to avoid discussing the greater gulf that lies between us.

When the publication catalogue for the German translation of my novel arrived recently, my wife, whose first language was German, spent some time looking at it before mentioning that the other books by American authors were listed as “Translated from English” while mine alone was “Translated from American.” I suspect that what they really were trying to say was “Translated from Minnesotan.”

The post Tater Tot Hotdish, Minnesota Soul Food appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But commuting for hours from my single mother’s modest apartment on the outskirts of the city to the upscale neighborhood of my private school, I often felt inadequate.

We came from a decidedly middle-class family. We had access to food, health care, and subsidized housing. We enjoyed road trips to the beach in the summer. We had the means for me to spend weekends at the city’s biggest mall, the sprawling Centro Ciudad Commercial Tamanaco, wasting time in its hundreds of stores and dining at Burger King with my friends. We could afford (though barely) to send me to a place where I could get a good education.

Nevertheless, at my elite private school filled with the conspicuous consumption of sifrinos and sifrinas, I was ashamed that I owned only one pair of trendy imported jeans. This was my world at the time: Growing up in Caracas in the 1980s meant that your money and personal connections—or lack thereof—could easily consume you. Even as a teen.

Never mind that my mother worked very hard to pay for my private school, to get food on our table, and to take us to the beach a few times a year. We had a steady home filled with our belongings: the same plants and couch from my entire childhood; the black-and-white photos my grandmother had left behind. But all I could think at the time was that I wasn’t spending summers in Miami like my other schoolmates, shopping till I dropped. In those days, my country was known as “Venezuela Saudita” (Saudi Venezuela) and my family clearly wasn’t cashing in.

Life went on for me in this kind of pretense for a few years. Then El Caracazo arrived.

El Caracazo, or El Sacudón, “the big shake-up,” started as street protests against government reforms that raised the price of gas and public transportation, but quickly erupted into an insurrection threatening to topple the neoliberal government of Carlos Andrés Pérez.

We were glued to the TV news as the unrest paralyzed our city with riots, shootings, and hundreds—some estimate thousands—of extrajudicial killings, most at the hands of security forces. Horror washed over us as we saw footage of dead bodies strewn on downtown streets and the empty shelves of looted stores. Shock overwhelmed us as we read newspaper headlines like “Mata el Hambre con Comida de Perros!” (“She Kills Her Hunger with Dog Food!”) that described a mother of seven who had resorted to feeding her family kibble amid the chaos.

Although my friends and I were too young and naïve to understand the real reasons behind El Caracazo at the time, I understand now that it was triggered by economic desperation—real desperation. An estimated half of Caracas’ residents were living in extreme poverty. But I had failed to see the despair that provoked impoverished men and women to take to the streets and risk their lives to face a brutally repressive regime. In my teenage obsession with stylish jeans and the Americanized CCCT shopping mall, I had been blind to how delusional my feeling of inadequacy was compared to the way most people in Venezuela lived.

The demonstrations lasted for a little over a week, but El Caracazo did not end. Political instability radiated beyond Caracas over the next year. Coup d’état atttempts followed, led by an idealistic military officer from working-class roots named Hugo Chávez. The country’s foreign debt mushroomed. Corruption charges plagued President Pérez and eventually forced him from office.

El Caracazo would go on to trigger a new world order. It would go on living inside all of us. And, it would push many to leave—including my mother and me.

In August of 1990, a few months after I’d turned 14, my mom and I gave our furniture away and stowed some boxes inside a friend’s house. We packed only a couple of suitcases with a few important things. A couple of nights before our one-way flight out of Caracas, my friends threw a party for me and we drank cuba libres—rum and Cokes—until I couldn’t see straight anymore. I cried for most of the night, wallowing in my drunkenness, fearing I would never see my friends again. Yet I also reveled in the thought that I was one of the first of my crew to leave, heading to the home of our teenage infatuations: the United States.

My first year in the U.S. was dreadful. In the suburban New Jersey town where my mom and I landed, I couldn’t find my way around, literally or figuratively. The quiet tree-lined streets, the orderly traffic, the friendly school crossing guard who mispronounced my name, the unthinkable assortment of sugary cereals in the supermarket—it all annoyed me in its civilized neatness. I missed Caracas, with its urban, sprawling chaos. There is something about home (or, perhaps, our colored memory of it) that is always comforting. Even if that home is rife with criminality and social inequality.

But after a year, just as I was ready to give up, things started clicking. Seemingly overnight, I was able to form coherent English sentences and carry on conversations. I became focused on sounding American—nothing made me happier than strangers telling me they couldn’t tell I had a “Hispanic” accent—and I insisted that my mother speak to me in English when we were in public. Now that I was surrounded by other public high school students whose parents lived in low-income apartments and drove beat-up cars, I could focus on being cool—indulging my rebelliousness, staying out until late at night—rather than on attaining social or economic status. I blossomed into an all-American teenager. The disparities in my world had shrunk to a more manageable size.

And as time went on, my idea of home started shifting as well. This is the sad reality of immigrants everywhere: The longer we stay in the new country, the more distant our old homes become. We are often overcome by nostalgia, taken, as Brazilians so eloquently describe, by saudade: “the love that remains.” Yet we hold out hope that the new place will one day truly become ours.

I eventually returned to Caracas a few times in the 1990s and 2000s. Each visit, I found a place less and less recognizable. In the time I was gone, Hugo Chávez, that charismatic military officer, had gone from coup leader to prisoner to president.

The violence and the poverty persisted, amidst the Chavista revolutionary hyperbole. Many of my old friends and neighbors, like hundreds of thousands of other Venezuelans during that time, had gone or were about to leave, driven by the deteriorating economy and the growing crime. Chiqui ventured to Spain. Lucía ran off to Colombia. Diego and Maya escaped to the U.S.

It’s been seven years since I last visited Venezuela, and only one of my school friends, Carolina, remains in the city of our childhood. She wrote to me recently and said that she wants to stay in her beautiful country, but that her family constantly thinks about leaving.

I now live in Ecuador, which has been boiling over with political unrest and street protests and yet—in a somewhat funny coincidence—welcoming an unprecedented number of immigrants from Venezuela. Not a day passes here where I don’t meet a fellow Venezuelan. Their stories are like mine—migrants leaving with just a few belongings, starting over in a new place. A few months ago, I met a 30-year-old electrician from Catia, one of Caracas’ slums. He had been working hard and had finally saved the money to bring his wife and sons from Venezuela. After reuniting with them, he told me, he has no intention of going back. “I never thought I’d say this,” he said, “but in just a few months, I can say that Ecuador is fast becoming home.”

I understand where he’s coming from, as I have developed a more elastic understanding of what that term means. I’ve bounced around a lot in the last few decades, stopping for a spell in places like New York City, San Francisco, Austin, Boston, La Paz, and San Diego. I’ve recognized that I am always looking for an escape route—to know, much like my mother did in 1990, that I can pack my bags and move to a better place. Today, my husband and I consider home anywhere we can find peace for us and our child. But if I am ever to find that everlasting peace in a single place, someday, I hope it ends up being back in Caracas.

The post Home Is Wherever There Is Peace appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Growing up, we lived by my mother’s family and visited her parents weekly at their road-side motel near a Puget Sound ferry landing, but I knew little about my father’s childhood, an ocean away, on a Piihonua sugarcane plantation near Hilo. I got a glimpse on occasional vacations to visit family on the Big Island of Hawaii or my aunties in Los Angeles. The only other traces were evident in the Spam in our sushi, the fact that we called instant ramen noodles saimin, and in the echoes of Pidgin English in Dad’s accent that refused to be erased.

I am a painter, and at the heart of my paintings is the journey I’ve been on to understand how these different currents have formed my American experience. I’ve followed their flow back in time to the canefields of Territorial Hawaii and early 20th-century Okinawa, Japan.

My father, George Kina, worked as a family practice doctor in our small Norwegian community of Poulsbo. Like so many other post-World War II Japanese-Americans, he had moved away from the ethnic enclave of his youth, made English his primary language, and tried to fit as much as possible into the American mainstream. My father’s mother Mitsue Gubu could not fit in, however. At age 55, she came to live with us. Grandma Kina was always in the present moment—laughing, teasing, watching TV, reading junky romance novels, and snacking on even junkier sweets or “weird” foods like dried cuttlefish and crack seed. But she never explained these tastes or her own story to us. Her own mother characterized her as someone who “couldn’t even make rice without burning it.”

In my grandma’s 89th year, I could waste no more time—I wanted to hear the stories of her Nisei generation (those born in the U.S. whose parents immigrated from Japan), and what they and the Sansei (children of the American-born generation) remembered of the Issei (the first Japanese immigrants to America). I hoped to learn more about our family history so I could pass this along to my own daughter. Although I had been back to his Big Island plantation community many times by then, in 2010, my father and I, with my then 5-year old daughter Midori in tow, returned to Piihonua with a purpose – to “talk story” with elders. Collectively, we would remember.

The Kina family in 1938

A trunk belonging to a Japanese immigrant who came to Hawaii to work on a sugar cane plantation in 1902

My great-grandfather Sakiji Gibu came to Hawaii before it became a part of the United States from the former Ryukyu Kingdom of Okinawa, which was annexed by Japan in 1879. He arrived in 1912 as a contract sugar plantation laborer as part of the Issei Uchinanchu (first-generation Okinawans) recruited by white American settlers who had recently overthrown the Hawaiian monarchy and aggressively imported foreign workers to drive down the cost of plantation labor. The Okinawans were just one ethnic group in a long succession of recruited foreign plantation labor to Hawaii that also included Chinese, mainland Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Portuguese, and African-American workers. My great-grandmother Makato Maehira arrived in Hawaii as one of the 20,000 “Picture Brides” who were married to men without seeing them because of severe immigration restrictions.

Grandma Kina was born in 1921, the third of four girls. Her two older sisters were Kibei—born in Hawaii, but raised in Okinawa. This was a common practice amongst the Japanese—wealthier families sent their children back for a “proper” education and cultural immersion; poorer families like mine were motivated by having one less mouth to feed. At 17, Grandma Kina joined her sisters as she was said to have been a particularly unproductive cane field worker with quite a big and loud mouth to feed.

Unlike her sisters who were fluent in Japanese, Grandma Kina spoke Pidgin English and Japanese and could not fully understand the local (and outlawed) Uchinaguchi language or standard Japanese. Because of this, she had difficulties assimilating into life in Okinawa. My relatives in Okinawa remember that she used to sing to herself in the mirror in English and tap dance in front of their house in Yonabaru. She also hung her laundry outside—including underwear—which was something the family considered impolite and a sign of her “stupidity.” She went back to Hawaii after only six months.

I found an old photograph of her from 1939 when she was at a port stop in Kobe, Japan, en route back to Honolulu. In the photo, my grandma is standing next to her older sister Nobue in front of an ocean liner. Grandma Kina has an open mouthed “All-American” smile and with a coy, three-quarters view, and is wearing a Western-style coat; her sister is wearing a kimono and looking sternly and directly at the camera. Nobue must have been tasked with escorting Mitsue back to the sugar plantation on the Kamakura Maru. My aunts told me that Grandma Kina’s mother greeted her return with, “Why did you come back?”

Talking story with elders in the Piihonua Kaikan (community center) on the former Piihonua Sugar Plantation, Hawaii

In 2012, it was my turn to go back to Japan to reconnect with our extended family. I made two trips that year—one with my dad (his second visit ever) and one alone. As disoriented tourists, Dad and I walked one day through the Kokusaidori Makishi Public Market in the bustling capital of Naha. My father stopped suddenly in front of a fish vendor recalling the familiar smell of katsuobushio. His grandmother, he remembered, used the dried bonito fish shavings to make dashi broth, which appears in everything from miso soup to ashitibichi (Okinawan pig feet soup). “Gochiso sama deshita,” he mumbled. “I used to say that after eating.”

He bought a whole dried fish wrapped carefully in newspaper to take home as a gift for mom. The smell of the fish began to trigger more memories of Japanese words he’d learned at Japanese school and the bits of colloquial Japanese they had used at home. On his first visit, our relatives had noted his old-fashioned way of speaking since it was a style of Japanese from when his grandparents first immigrated.

My father and I visited the rebuilt Maehira family home my Grandma had stayed at in Yonabaru. It had been carpet bombed in the “typhoon of steel” by the U.S. during the 82-day long Battle of Okinawa in World War II. Four of our family members, including my great-great-grandmother, were among the over 200,000 people killed. If my Grandma Kina and her sisters had stayed, would they have been victims, too?

In the post-war years under U.S. occupation, my great-grandmother sent care packages back to the family in Okinawa—smuggling U.S. dollars by sewing money into the hems of clothes and filling canning jars with homemade caramel candy and hiding money in the tops of the lids. My father’s generation had no idea of the mass destruction or of the outpouring of help from Hawaii’s Uchinanchu. No one talked about those efforts, or the ways the roots and branches our family trees have meandered and tangled and found their way to new water.

The Maehira family in 2012

These journeys with my father to hear family stories, and cull from family and public photographic archives led to my “Sugar” and “Blue Hawai’i” series of oil paintings, some of which are in the Sugar/Islands: Finding Okinawa in Hawai’i—the Art of Laura Kina and Emily Hanako Momohara exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Making these paintings has enabled me to tread back through these currents of history in search of my origins, propelling me to the present and leaving me standing on multiple American shores. Okinawa has reverted back to Japan and Hawaii has become a state, but the U.S. military continues maintain a strong presence on both islands, and they’ve both been transformed by tourism and histories of colonialism. To understand my relationship to these spaces as an American, I keep painting.

I am getting to know the younger generation of relatives in Okinawa and I have started leading a study abroad course in Okinawa on Okinawan art and politics at DePaul University in Chicago, where I teach. My father and I are trying to learn Japanese. He’s doing this, he says, because he regrets not paying attention in Japanese school as a kid and I am doing it because I hope one day not to need a translator to hear my own family’s stories. Maybe we can even learn some of our indigenous Uchinaguchi language.

The post From Okinawa to Hawaii and Back Again appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I can honestly say this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone high-five over New Jersey,” the activity leader says. The group chuckles. I shrug. She just doesn’t get it.

To be fair, most people don’t. They think of New Jersey as “the armpit of America” or some sort of Jersey Shore/Sopranos hybrid, where in between getting drunk and getting tan it’s perfectly normal to firm up your illegal deals in the back room of a strip club. As someone who grew up in the Garden State (like Buzz Aldrin, Queen Latifah, Dennis Rodman, and many, many others—after all, N.J. is the 11th most populated state in the country), I can tell you that it’s far more mundane than the television shows would suggest. Many were the Saturday nights in high school when my friends and I lamented that there was nothing to do in town.

I think my experience in Livingston was typical of American suburbia. I was happy to live close enough to Manhattan that a trip into “The City” was easy and quick, but I liked spending time in my hometown, too. I loved the neighborhood haunts where you could get a meal named after the high school mascot and the small shops that, while not brand names, carried high-quality, fashionable goods.

When it was time to think about college, I wanted to get out of the state not because I felt I needed to escape something, but simply because I wanted to see more of the country. In doing so, I found out that when you leave Jersey’s borders—even if it’s just, as in my case, to venture as far away as Boston—outsiders with a ton of assumptions and associations await.

Some samples:

“I was on the turnpike once. Is the whole state like that?” (No. There are lawns and trees and businesses other than strip malls and rest stops.)

“I’ve heard it smells bad.” (The Meadowlands are, literally, a swamp, surrounded by factories, so yes, that particular area, which you pass through when you head east from Manhattan, does have an acrid smell. But the solution is simple: get off the turnpike.)

“There sure are a lot of diners.” (Yes, and thank god for them.)

What surprised me most was how much other people’s opinions about my home state bugged me. I never had felt any particular pride about where I was from while I was growing up. It was just a fact, like my eye color or my age. I didn’t think it meant anything. But once I left the state, it became part of my identity. How else to explain my unbridled excitement the one and only time I ever worked a gas pump myself, my understanding of jug-handle turns, or why I feel no shame when belting out any Bruce Springsteen or Bon Jovi song, regardless of who is around?

I admit that I may have gone a little overboard at first. By the time my first semester at college was over, for every negative comment someone made about “the dirty Jerz,” I would be ready to counter with interesting facts (New Jersey is the only state where every town is a suburb of either New York or Philadelphia), celebrity natives (Jason Alexander and Chelsea Handler went to my high school), or just straight-up pride (New Jersey is awesome, and you have no idea what you’re talking about).

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I understand the easy appeal of generalizations. I’ve made a few pithy comments about other locations myself. When my AmeriCorps team was assigned to work in Oklahoma, I wondered aloud how a group of cows and horses had filled out the application to receive help from the program. Of course, after spending time there, I realized how badly I’d misjudged the place. I only wish others would afford the Garden State some open-mindedness as well.

It’s not that New Jersey is better than other states. The George Washington Bridge scandal was embarrassing, as is the fact that The Real Housewives of New Jersey is filmed there. And I admit that you can’t call either the Turnpike or the Parkway “scenic.” But for all of its flaws, real or perceived, New Jersey is still the place where I feel comfortable. I like that its greatness is understated, as opposed to Manhattan’s glamour or California’s cool. It’s not going out of its way to try to impress you. It is what it is, and you either get it or not.

Travel is said to broaden horizons and gain understanding. However, it also brings an awareness to what you have left behind, to what is home.

The post I Heart N.J. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As we boarded our flight back home to Washington, D.C., I steered my dad toward business class, while my husband continued with my mother and two young daughters toward coach.

Dad started to follow them. I pulled him toward our premium seats, “We’re sitting here.”

Puzzled, he looked toward our family walking away.

“Abby!” he called out to my 8-year old.

“Huei-Chen!” he called to my mother.

“Shhhhh,” I said. “our seats are here.”

He didn’t understand. Why in the world would we be separated from the others? In his 85 years, he had only ever flown in the back half of the plane. It was unthinkable to fly anything else.

As the plane took off, Dad stood up, and again started shouting and heading to coach. I cut him off in the aisle and bodily steered him back into his seat.

I glanced at the video screen in front of us. Our trip route was outlined on the map–a long dotted line across a very wide blue Pacific Ocean. Time to destination: 12 hours, 15 minutes.

This was our third trip to China in as many years. At his request, my husband and I had taken him on his “last trip back to China,” after he had survived a major stroke in 2009, and, then again, after he recovered from pancreatic cancer surgery in 2011.

It was clear that these brushes with mortality had made him feel the call of his birth country more intensely than ever. Born in Quanzhou, a southeastern port city, my father came of age during the chaotic years before and during World War II. His father, like generations of southern Chinese men before him, left to work as a merchant in Vietnam, so my Dad and his two brothers were raised single-handedly by their mother. Just young enough to avoid being conscripted by both the Kuomintang and the Communists, my Dad left Quanzhou in 1947 for medical school in Taiwan. Two years later, the Communists would close off China from the rest of the world. My father, who later immigrated from Taiwan to the United States, would not see his parents, his two brothers, and the two younger sisters born after his departure, for 32 years.

By the time the U.S. and China normalized relations in 1979, my father was in his 50s and practicing medicine at a small hospital in the D.C. suburbs. That summer, he made his first trip back to the country he left as a teenager. He would travel back home every few years, bringing jade trinkets for my sister and me, and occasionally smuggling cuttings from his mother’s plants in his underwear. Until he became too infirm to travel alone, he never invited my mother, sister, or me to go with him.

In 2012, as China’s traditional Tomb Sweeping Day approached, my father, again, asked to go home “one last time.” His health and cognition were declining rapidly. Every step he took had become a struggle. More and more words had retreated beyond his grasp. But seeing his mother’s grave one more time was the one desire he was still able to express repeatedly and clearly to me. We knew we were tempting fate. We agreed to take him.

We traveled as an unruly party of six, with strollers, car seats, and a wheelchair. Jet lag got us all up very early on our first morning in China. Dad looked very tired. It was clear that he had slept little. We debated whether to follow through on our plan to get a photo of our two daughters with their grandparents at the Great Wall. It would likely be our only chance to create the memory.

“Let’s go,” Dad said.

We tried to make the journey as low impact as possible. We hired a van to drive us all the way to the entrance so that we could wheel him straight to the photo op.

Dad was in a great mood on the drive up. He sat in the front seat, and chatted with the driver. He recited Chinese poetry about the Great Wall. We felt as if we might pull it off.

We thought Dad had fallen asleep as my husband wheeled him up the wide stone path to the entrance. So we decided to eat lunch and wait for him to wake. Then, he started listing to one side of his chair, squirming, moaning, and speaking gibberish. For a few moments, we sat paralyzed, staring at my father.

My husband started running my father and his chair back to the parking lot. I started dialing the driver’s number, and rushed the children and my mother out the door, four Styrofoam boxes of soggy noodles hanging from my wrist. Luckily the driver had not wandered far. The girls, aware that a terrible crisis was underway, sat quietly in the van’s backseat, and stared, wide-eyed, at their rocking, groaning grandfather. During the hour-long drive back to Beijing, our 3-year old fell asleep holding her ears.

In the hospital, my father regained his ability to move and walk, but my heart sank when I realized that his weak cognition had been compromised even further. He could form few recognizable sentences or phrases. He pulled out his IVs. “I am a doctor!” he said. He struggled with the nurses. They bound his wrists to the bed. His arms became red and chafed from his struggles with the bindings. He refused to eat or drink. Like a baby, he would only sleep when helped to a wheelchair and wheeled out to what he thought was an imminent discharge. “Let’s go home,” he kept saying. “Let’s go home.”

The staff requested that I sleep in the room to help manage him. A security guard kept me company. I was exhausted, and embarrassed that we had brought a man with my father’s medical history to China in the first place. The physician who treated him in Beijing didn’t hold back his thoughts. “He’s had a long, high-functioning, high-achieving life,” the doctor said. “I don’t think he would want to live like this. It may be time to let him go.”

Continuing with the trip was out of the question. My father barely knew where he was. So, 10 days after arriving in Beijing, we took him home.

I could not persuade my Dad to stay in his seat. He waved away the mimosas and warmed nuts. Instead, he kept standing, and yelling, “Huei Chen! Abby! Let’s go!” He refused to take more than a tiny sip of the Coke I had secretly laced with crushed sedatives.

Nearby passengers had started to stare. Worried that we would all get forced off the flight and abandoned on some Pacific island, I raced back to get help from my husband. He was dealing with his own crisis–our daughter had thrown up in her seat.

A flight attendant – a wide woman nearing retirement age, approached my husband as he crouched at my Dad’s feet, trying to keep him seated. “Sir, you cannot come to the business class cabin.” My husband fumed. “Do you really want to force the pilot to put down this aircraft? I am trying to calm him.”

My Dad got up again. I decided not to struggle. I led him back to the kids. He smiled when he saw them. “Abby!” He gestured at the front of the plane. “Let’s go. Let’s go get some dinner.” Abby was happily watching the Nickelodeon channel in her seat. He leaned against a passenger seat and waited. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

After a few minutes, I started to nudge him back to our seats. He started walking, saw the bathroom door, and went in. He was wearing a diaper that needed changing. I braced myself.

I steered him back to our seats. But he refused to sit. He stood in the business class galley, right across from the door. “Let’s go!” he said, pointing to the door. Three flight attendants approached me. I had to get him to sit, they said. I told them I had sleeping pills. Could they help me? A call went over the loudspeaker for a doctor. A plastic surgeon from Chile stood up. “Does he have a favorite food?”

We crushed a pill and packed it into a small piece of red bean cake. He refused the cake. I took the piece, waited until he started speaking, and slipped it into his open mouth. He started to spit it out, but then, liking the taste, swallowed it.

A flight attendant helped walk him back to his seat. She knelt at his feet and patiently patted his arm for close to an hour. He drifted to sleep. “My mother has Alzheimer’s,” she said.

The purser, the one who had yelled at us at the beginning of the flight, came up to me: “I went through this last year, too.” A third flight attendant approached to tell me about her own mother.

The sedative lasted just 90 minutes. The pattern of waking, walking toward the coach cabin, visiting the kids, struggling with the diaper in the bathroom, yelling, gesturing toward the door, repeated itself over and over and over again until we landed.

At Dulles Airport, we waited for the rest of the passengers to deplane before we attempted to move my father, who, just like our toddler, had finally fallen into a sound sleep during the plane’s final turns on landing. We gathered our family together and gently nudged Dad. “Let’s go home.”

My father died in his house of another stroke a few months after we returned from the trip. I received the phone call around dawn. His caregiver said my father had been pacing around the family room and then sat down suddenly, bracing himself against the coffee table, as if he knew something was about to happen. I hope that in those final moments, he saw his mother, and heard her calling him home.

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