“Hija, you have to go. You’re going to miss the wedding,” said my mom, weak but urgent. My husband and I would be hosting my niece’s wedding in our home that April afternoon. My son Michael was setting up chairs in the backyard; my husband Ian, a judge, was getting ready to perform the ceremony.

Mom and I were in the county hospital ER, where we’d been for over 24 hours since she’d fallen outside her home.

I didn’t want to leave. But then two of my tias—my 90-year-old mother’s cousins, themselves in their 70s and 80s but always in and out of her apartment to offer help and company—swept in. They turned the eerie quiet of a Saturday afternoon ER into a familial space, sitting by her bedside, handing her water she couldn’t readily reach, adjusting her pillows and blankets. Go on, they said, assuring me they’d call and put me on speakerphone should the doctor come by.

On the surface, the gathering that was about to begin in our backyard and the scene at the hospital had little in common. But maybe they’re not that different. Weddings and hospitals are both about showing up for people you love. Weddings are about standing witness to someone’s love, showing that you will be the community they can turn to in times of joy and times of sorrow. A hospital is a place of sorrow, where the people you love hopefully bring moments of joy through sharing stories, photos, comfort.

In my familia, we understand that family and true friends don’t only show up for the good times. They visit the hospital or the jail, and they don’t miss your funeral. My family is originally from the Mexican state of Nayarit, but since settling in Los Angeles they have grown into an ever-widening circle of kin—literal and fictive. My tias showed up for mom and me that day, but they also provided me solace in knowing that our community will stand by her, physically and emotionally, as she navigates the challenges of aging, sharing joy in each other’s company no matter what the occasion.

Weddings and hospitals, for our family, are also about food. When someone gets married, we eat beef, chicken, fish, or pasta dishes at the reception. But the meal we all anticipate is the posole or tamales we eat together the next day at the recalentado. In Spanish, recalentado means “reheated,” though in these cases it’s a specially prepared meal; only the gossip is a rehash from the day before as we reminisce about the good times. Others take the opportunity to nurse hangovers, a spoonful of posole at a time. When someone is sick, my aunts prepare hearty guisados—stewed meats—wrapped in flour tortillas as burritos or folded into corn tortillas as taquitos. We brought tacos to my Tia Chayo in the hospital that we ended up sharing with her roommate, too, only to discover the roommate was on a restricted diet. The contraband tacos didn’t do any harm, but the roommate’s family grilled her on where she got them while we sat mum, stuffing our bags and coolers under my tia’s hospital bed.

Hospitals, like weddings, can grow our circles and strengthen our bonds. When hospitals limit patients to two visitors at a time, the rest of us sit in the waiting room. There, where Spanish speakers can feel like outsiders, on unequal footing with doctors wielding authority, fellow Latinos bring comfort and community, and people to ask their questions to, even if they can’t get definitive medical answers. There, they compare experiences, share stories about their loved ones, discuss how the hospital staff and doctors are treating them.

When my uncle passed after a fall and a stay in the ICU this past January, we couldn’t all be with my tia, his wife of 54 years, because we were in consultation with the doctors. On our hardest day, it was the señora she met in the waiting room who sat with her, holding her hand, offering comfort as only a comadre could. Theirs was a bond forged not through sacraments like baptism or communion, but through the shared experience of life’s passages. This time, it was the sacrament of saying farewell. It was a profound connection in an unlikely place.

Two images from the day of my niece’s wedding are intertwined in my mind. Standing in the sunlight, my niece is radiant in her short white dress with a flared A-line skirt, long sleeves, and embroidered collar, her shiny waist-length black hair vivid against the bright white tulle. My mom, 90 years old, lies in a paper-thin gown under harsh fluorescent lights, her neck supported by a brace. On the surface, the scenes have little in common.

But maybe they’re not that different. The reception was in full swing when I arrived home from the hospital. I dashed upstairs to throw on a dress and as I changed, I could hear the laughter wafting up from the backyard. Just then, I got a text from my cousin Karla, younger than my tias by decades. She was at the hospital. I hadn’t asked her help, but there she was. “The whole gang is here,” she wrote. “There are five of us! We’re trying to keep the laughter down so that they don’t kick us out!” The message flooded me with gratitude, though I knew my family didn’t need it. For us, whether in a hospital, at home, or at a party, being together is reason enough for celebration.

The post How Weddings and Hospitals Forge <i>Familia</i> appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I think of my Uncle Jim, I often remember him as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Jim Mathews, who died earlier this summer at age 77, loved to perform in community theater productions near his home in San Mateo. He sang in many shows and took on many roles, but his signature was playing the former president in the musical Annie, that classic Depression story about an orphan girl taken in by a rich capitalist, Daddy Warbucks.

Late in the show, Annie and Daddy Warbucks go to the White House, where FDR is considering a new program of social supports for struggling Americans. “I want to feed them and house them and pay them. Not much, but enough to send home to their parents,” Jim, as the president, would declare.

Through the song “Tomorrow,” Annie convinces FDR to go forward with this New Deal. Then, in the best moment of Jim’s performance, he would rise and start a solo.

When I’m stuck with a day

That’s gray, and lonely.

 I just stick out my chin and grin, and say…

Then he’d pause, turn to the audience and add, “Now sing with me! Republicans too!”

I share this memory with you now because so many of us are stuck in gray days. There’s an epidemic of loneliness, even here in friendly, bright California. The world’s awfulness often stops us in our tracks.

Jim had more than his share of gray days. He was injured at birth, and his parents (my grandparents) were told he never would walk (he did, with a pronounced prancing style, after a lot of therapy). He never married or had children (though his niece and two nephews, including me, treasured him as a quasi-parental figure). He never achieved any particular renown (though I’m trying with this column).

Far too often in the Golden State, and especially in Silicon Valley, where Jim spent almost all his life, the conventional wisdom is that you need a big and well-known technology, with venture funding and a giant brain, to shape the future. Jim’s example puts the lie to that thinking. He had a wonderful life, in a Frank-Capraesque way. Because he understood that life and technology, a subject he made a career teaching, are built out of small things. So are better tomorrows.

James Mathews was born in 1946 in Long Beach, one of Southern California’s bigger cities. His parents—a civilian U.S. Navy employee and a teacher—moved him to San Mateo when he was in elementary school.

San Mateo is a smaller city, of 100,000, but whenever I visited him there—which was often—he made the place seem grand. Wherever you went with him became enchanted. The little train and the big trees in Central Park. The playgrounds and fields at Hillsdale High and Laurel Elementary. The little branch libraries. His beloved College Heights Church, a highly democratic and informal place where almost every member of the congregation, adult and child, would talk during the service.

The church sat atop a windswept hill, with bay views so glorious that I sometimes wondered: Who needs heaven?

Jim’s magic was that he paid attention to little things. “Don’t step on those—they’re California poppies,” he once advised. “Those are the state flower!” And he engaged with everyone, even people who were scary. At Hillsdale High, Jim was no jock, and the 25-year-old football coach had intimidating intensity.  But instead of backing away, Jim volunteered to be the team manager and learned lasting lessons about teamwork from that coach, the future Super Bowl winner Dick Vermeil.

If you thought like Jim, everything seemed like an opportunity. Jim, who graduated from San Francisco State, eventually got a low-profile job at the College of San Mateo, a community college. Over 21 years, he and his colleagues found ways to add the best new computers and technology, ultimately creating a dynamic media lab. From there, he went to Baywood Elementary, where he created not one but two tech labs. He designed them to teach not just students, but teachers and parents. Jim insisted that students fix the computers themselves.

“Grandpa Geek,” they called him.

Technology, Jim would say, was not this big force to be feared or celebrated. Technology was really just a lot of little things, and the fun was to be had in tinkering, and figuring out how to use them together.

Speaking of fun, the most fun I ever had in my life was when Uncle Jim would visit Southern California and take my brother and me to Disneyland. I’d gone to Disneyland with other relatives, but it was boring—you’d wait in long lines for the biggest rides. But Jim took us to everything and emphasized the little treasures: the Enchanted Tiki Room, the rock formations on Tom Sawyer Island, the real-world potential of the automated People Mover in Tomorrowland, which he considered the best land. (He was right about the People Mover—they are installing a new one at LAX now.)

The little things that mattered most to Jim were charity. He looked for ways to help. He donated to the people at the door. And to the people who called on the phone. I once asked Jim if he was a soft touch. His answer: What’s wrong with being a soft touch?

Jim didn’t like it when people tried to take care of him, but he loved to help take care of other people.

Eight years ago, Jim, feeling a bit lonely after retiring and moving back into his deceased parents’ home, heard at church about a woman and her two young sons who were unhoused and needed a place to stay. He invited them to move in with him. They stayed for five years. He didn’t see it as an act of generosity. He was benefiting from this “house sharing,” from the companionship and help of his roommates.

Once, when I had dinner with all of them, Jim said he felt like a fool—for not having shared his home with people in similar circumstances many years earlier.

But Jim didn’t dwell on regrets. He was determined not to get bogged down with today’s problems. Because a new opportunity to help someone else will always present itself. And soon. Maybe even tomorrow, which is only a day away.

The post My Late Uncle Jim’s Life of Tomorrows appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Late one afternoon last year, during a troubled time in my life, I took a long walk on the beach.

A day of rain was ending. Watery sunlight shone on glossy streets. It was a brief lull in California’s unrelenting winter. To the west, a layer of cirrus clouds announced another storm approaching. A high wind chased the departing rain, churning the sea into a tangle of waves.

I had been here—the Redondo Beach shoreline at the southern end of Santa Monica Bay—many times before. I spent most of my childhood in a small house about a mile away. Even after moving to Long Beach as a teenager, and eventually leaving California altogether to raise my family in New York City, I never stopped returning to Redondo Beach.

Why do some people return again and again to the places they grew up? Not everyone does. Some leave and never look back. Others never leave at all. Regardless, I think everyone has a place like this beach—a place where they go, even if only in their mind, when they are hurt, or lost, or lonely. A place where memories feel particularly vivid, and where the landscape is charged with an enduring goodness and rightness that is hard to put into words.

A need for such goodness and rightness had drawn me to the ocean on that winter afternoon. Earlier that day, my younger brother and I had moved my mom, who is 81, into a memory care facility.

It happened to be in Redondo Beach. We hadn’t set out to return to the place where our family started. It just worked out that way. This facility was one of the few memory care places we could find in Southern California that would accept my mother’s two beloved dogs. Now we were here at a time of endings.

My mom has dementia. She was diagnosed in 2018 and lived for several years in an assisted living place in Orange County, until her memory loss required a higher level of care. In her prime, she was a newspaper reporter with a generous heart, an observant mind, and a wised-up take on the world. My dad, until he suffered a massive stroke when I was 9, worked in newspapers too. He was more bookish and ruminative.

My mom supplied the energy, the fun, and a lot of the volatility in our household. After my dad’s stroke, she raised us singlehandedly, worked full time, and cared for my dad. She kept the house running, took us on vacations, and taught us to respect and be curious about other people, no matter who they were or where they came from.

To cope with caring for my dad, she also turned to drinking. Our childhood was a careening mix of love and chaos.

All caregiving is hard. Caregiving for a parent with whom you have a complicated relationship is harder. My mom’s dementia, doctors say, is caused in part by her drinking. She was like a storm that churned through our lives. Now we’re surveying the damage and doing our best to clean things up.

Given all those complicated feelings, you’d think I’d want little to do with the place I was raised. Yet that afternoon, after moving my mom into her room with just a few possessions so she didn’t hide or lose them, I knew exactly where I needed to go. I drove straight to the beach, parked the car, and started walking. I went in search of memories.

I am now the keeper of my family’s memories. All of my grandparents died when I was a child. My dad died in 2005. One of my cousins is delving into family genealogy, but I am the oldest one who remembers the days and years of that Redondo Beach childhood. It’s an unsettling responsibility. I tell stories to my own kids, but even as I tell them, I recognize how much the stories leave out.

The memories I sought walking along the beach were something other than stories. Memory, on its own, is not particularly reliable. It often takes the form of stories, which edit and package reality. Places are different. On their own, they tell no stories. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say they tell all the stories. At every moment, they are featuring in countless people’s experiences and memories.

If you return to the same place enough times, during every stage of your life, layers of memory accumulate. Viewed as a whole, those layers can begin to reveal truths deeper than any story. It can feel like stepping outside yourself and seeing the entirety of your life stacked like a pile of snapshots. There is no obvious connection between the snapshots, except that the same person and the same place are in each one. You could arrange them into a pattern and tell a story. You could just as easily mix them up and tell a different story. At a certain point, you give up editing and packaging.

The deeper truth that emerges from all of that has something to do with continuity and change existing simultaneously, not canceling each other out.

Redondo Beach has changed a lot in the decades since I was born. Its average home price is now close to $1.5 million. My parents bought their house in the early 1970s for $35,000. You could see a sliver of ocean from my bedroom but our street was not high class. Our neighbors were a biker gang, a family who worked in pest control, some retirees, and a guy who grew pot in his backyard. We duct-taped our shoes to make them last longer. The kids at my school were mostly stoners, metalheads, or, from the nicer part of town, children of Japanese aerospace engineers. There weren’t a lot of playgrounds, so we sought out construction sites, where we improvised BMX bike tracks and staged dirt-clod battles.

Because a zoning change in the 1970s lifted density limits throughout the city, there were many construction sites. Peeling bungalows gave way to glossy multistory complexes, school enrollment shrank and campuses closed. Redondo has never been as upscale as its South Bay neighbors, Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach, in part because the northern part of the city abuts a big oil refinery. Its pier, despite many attempted improvements, remains seemingly unalterably dilapidated. But Redondo Beach has grown more expensive, and more international. Today, a fifth of residents are foreign born. A bare majority are white. It’s like the rest of L.A., riding economic waves and growing ever more defined by a kaleidoscope of cultures.

So much change. And yet, at the same time, just as I remember. That winter afternoon last January, I parked at the southern end of the beach. Parts of the bike path were still submerged in pools of water. I walked to the sand, which was cold and wet. I took off my shoes and let the waves come up and around my legs.

There were sand pipers. Sea gulls. A few intrepid surfers rode the storm swell. The wind blew so hard, I could hear nothing but air and water. Walking along like that, I could have been five years old, or 50. The sea, the sand, the waves, and the wind were the same. Along the bluff top, I recognized most of the condo buildings. I had watched them go up as a child. There they were, unchanged.

People grow older, everything changes. And yet, inside, we peer out from the same place we peered from as a child. My father, near the end of his life, barely able to stand, shook his head and said, “You know, inside, I still feel like I’m in elementary school.”

I find such thoughts immensely comforting as I watch my mom decline. Her story, and maybe the story of our family, is not all that happy. It helps to see her life not as a story but as a totality, too complicated for stories. At the heart of all the change and loss, there remains a singular person, whom I love.

I return to Redondo Beach because it teaches me a great redeeming fact about life: That what is good and right about a person—maybe about the world itself—endures even as everything else changes and fades away. I need to be reminded of that, especially now. I hope you have a place that does the same for you.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Redondo Beach Brings Me Back to Myself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Is there a family trait more common than keeping secrets?

These secrets can have hidden costs. When we leave a place or person behind, we don’t know what becomes of them. We miss out. We cut them out of our familial history.

These secrets can even make us miss the entire life of a loved one—a burrowed family secret, not passed down, and brought to light only in late harvest.

That’s one lesson of the most thought-provoking California story I’ve come across in years. It’s told with heart and heightened imagination by David Mas Masumoto, the Central Valley writer and farmer, in his recent memoir Secret Harvests.

The book ranges widely but at its center is Shizuko Sugimoto.

She was the sister of Masumoto’s mother. But he didn’t know she even existed until about a decade ago, when a Fresno funeral home called to ask if Sugimoto, who was 90 and appeared near death, was related.

He was skeptical about the call at first—could this be a scam?—but he went to meet her and began talking with family members about her. In the process, he pieced together many elements of the life of an extraordinary California woman whose very existence had been a family secret.

Sugimoto was born in Fowler, California in October 1919, daughter of a family of farmworkers of Japanese heritage. At age 5, she contracted meningitis, which attacked her brain. No one called a doctor. No one knew what to do.

The illness left Sugimoto with an intellectual disability. She would never again complete a full sentence or thought. In the recollections of Masumoto’s family, she was described as “confused, fuzzy, irritable, and difficult to comfort, traits that will linger for a lifetime.”

She was 23 in 1942, when the family was ordered to evacuate to Arizona as part of the government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans. The burdens on the family were immense—it was just before the harvest, and they were being evicted from their rented home. How could they survive in a concentration camp?

The father went to Arizona, and died within a month. But Sugimoto remained in California. A few days before the evacuation, the family turned her over to a county sheriff, making her a “ward of the state.”

It’s believed that Sugimoto lived in various institutions from 1942 until the early 1950s. It’s unclear where. Masumoto learned that some relatives had spent years searching for her after World War II, and may even have visited her at a facility in Porterville. The story goes that once they found her and visited her, they believed that she was doing better than she might have done with her own family, who were trying to rebuild their lives after incarceration. So they left her where she was, and resolved not to speak of her again.

Other family members who had known Sugimoto were left to assume she had died. But she had lived, moving between institutions for decades. Masumoto would learn that she spent several years, until the 1970s, at the DeWitt State Hospital in the foothills above Sacramento. For a time, she was at a Fresno-area facility only a few miles from his farm in unincorporated Del Rey.

Sugimoto had been living at the Golden Cross nursing home for 13 years when Masumoto received the call asking if he was the relative of a person whose existence was unknown to him.

“How do you tell your family that after seventy years, you ‘found’ their sister and aunt?” he writes. “None of us had seen her since 1942. No one knew anything about her. There are no photographs of her existence.”

When he went to see her, she had suffered a stroke and was in bed, dying.

“I am struck by her size, small and compact, folded in a fetal position. She appears comfortable, breathing gently as if asleep. She lays motionless and alone, real and authentic. This is not historical research conducted safely behind words, photographs and artifacts. I touch her warm hand, feel a bony shoulder, hear a soft sigh as she moves her head to one side. She embodies all that is wrong and right in the world, the sorrow and joy of life, the guilt and happiness of family. She delivers light to our dark past; she complicates and completes us.”

But that was not the end of the story. Masumoto got to know the staff that cared for Sugi, as they called his aunt. In the book, he praises them, and gives his due to the system that kept her alive into her 90s. The caregivers tell him of her feistiness, how she loves to tease and tickle them, how she adores music and dancing, how she wanders the halls, and how she drinks her morning coffee and then throws the cup behind her.

“She is a real character,” he writes. “Sugi has a home here. … Her disability is not a punishment and not a cure… She refuses to believe anything is wrong with her.”

As Masumoto and his family were making plans for her funeral, one day, amazingly, Sugimoto woke up. She returned to moving through the halls. She playfully kicked Masumoto in the leg. “Shizuko came to life and visits us,” he writes. “She is a living ancestor, awakened to illuminate. She no longer lives in the shadows and now steps into the light of family and our history.”

When she later died, shortly before her 94th birthday, she was the oldest client at the Central Valley Regional Center. At her funeral, the family passed out plastic cups. Mourners pretended to sip coffee, and then tossed the cups blindly behind them.

Sugimoto was interred in the family mausoleum, and Masumoto dedicated a bench at the Fresno Fairgrounds—she loved the Big Fresno Fair—to her and “those with disabilities and special needs who were separated from their families” during the World War II relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans.

When I spoke with Masumoto recently, he talked about Sugimoto’s story, and the roles racism and discrimination against people with disabilities played in it. But we also talked about secrets, especially in families, and all that we miss when we keep them.

“I now force myself not to look away,” he said, adding: “Memories can and should change.”

The post What’s the Cost of a Family Secret? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our mission is to connect people to ideas and to each other, which is why we have honored authors who explore these themes for over a dozen years now. Whether it’s a public health emergency or a political crisis, current events continue to make our mission feel increasingly urgent.

Because community is such a vast field of inquiry that can be explored in myriad ways, we accept submissions on a broad array of topics and themes from many disciplines of investigation. The 12 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. They are historians and journalists, economists and philosophers. Previous winners have studied a single location (whether that’s Hattiesburg, Mississippi during the Jim Crow era or an Eastern European border town in the centuries leading up to the Holocaust) as well as phenomena, including cooperation, technology, and morality.

As with everything else Zócalo features, we are on the lookout for that rare combination of brilliance and clarity, excellence and accessibility. The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize selection committee consists of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes chief executive officer Leticia Rhi Buckley, Texas Tribune editor in chief Sewell Chan, former California governor Gray Davis, The Sum of Us author and 2022 Zócalo Book Prize winner Heather McGhee, Goldhirsh Foundation president Tara Roth, USC professor of American studies & ethnicity and history George J. Sanchez, and Zócalo trustee and Boeing engineer Reza Zaidi.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and speak at a public program, including an award ceremony, where they will deliver a lecture based on their work, and participate in an interview, in Los Angeles in spring 2023. We will also recognize the authors of the books we select for our short list. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit this year is October 28, 2022 at 11:59 PM PDT. Books must have been published in the U.S. between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022 to be eligible. Please send a single copy of any books nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date to:

Zócalo Public Square
c/o Book Prize Committee
1111 South Broadway
Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Our past winners are:

• Heather McGhee for The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World)
• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post The 2023 Zócalo Book Prize Honors Explorations of Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’d moved to Portugal after securing some remote freelance work. My plan was to add a language to my lopsided resume—I already spoke Spanish passingly and knew that the modest difference between the two would enable me to achieve a baseline of fluency in a matter of months, rather than years—but there were also sentimental reasons for the move: except for my mother, all my matrilineal relatives live in Portugal. I wanted the chance to better understand my family, who, for most of my childhood, had existed as faceless names on the other end of pricey international calls, and to better understand where I came from.

Portugal is also a favorable country for those looking to immigrate: between its aging population, a small existing foreign-born population (just over 5 percent of the country’s 10 million residents, compared to 15 percent of neighboring Spain, and 12 percent of France), and a brain drain, authorities know that the country needs young foreigners serious about establishing roots, and has accordingly lax immigration policies. Just the “promise of a work contract” is enough to secure residency. What I didn’t know was how the connection between those policies and my love for basketball would come to define my life in Lisbon.

The best court, I’d been told, was located at the top of a 10 square-kilometer nature reserve called the Parque Florestal de Monsanto, just outside the city center. The bus ride from my apartment took the better part of an hour, and the hike up to the court added another 20 minutes. The view was beautiful, overlooking Lisbon’s famous 25 de Abril Bridge, but the height meant constant wind, which made for a uniquely poor basketball experience. The empty court, the long trip, and the suboptimal conditions confirmed what I already knew: Portugal isn’t big on basketball. I resigned myself to the idea that the sport wouldn’t be part of my life here.

Then I took a shortcut that changed everything. Running late to meet up with some friends at a reggaeton bar in Bairro Alto, I decided not to risk waiting for the metro and began to cut haphazardly across the residential labyrinth situated between the blue and green metro lines. As I made my way through the Campo dos Mártires da Pátria park, I noticed a few young men playing basketball.

The Campo dos Mártires da Pátria park itself is not especially remarkable: there’s a duck pond for young parents to bring their children, a small gazebo to buy coffee. It’s a speck of green in a city known neither for its shade nor its verdure. But its basketball court—a vibrant, multicolored mosaic of geometric shapes and patterns—is a work of art. I couldn’t resist. Despite being dressed in chino pants and a short-sleeve button-up (in preparation for a night of drinks and dancing), they welcomed me in to play. By the time the game was over, the Campo already felt like my second home. This wasn’t only because the Campo was clearly the court for basketball in Lisbon, but also because most of the players it attracted were, like me, foreigners.

Everyone had a story about how they’d ended up in Portugal. Agnelo, the de facto administrator of the Campo, was a thirty-something Angolan who’d come to Lisbon as a teenager. I thought at one point that he worked in construction because one of the other players kept calling him “o pedreiro mais famoso de Lisboa”—the most famous bricklayer in Lisbon—but I later realized that this was a literal translation of an English-language insult for someone who can’t make a shot: “Brick!” Agnelo could dish out the trash talk just as well as he received it, but it was his peacekeeping that I remember most. Even from the other side of the park, you could hear his pleas to get the game going again: “Play, man! Let’s just play!”

Over sweaty post-game beers, I talked literature with Amsfgoro, a Cabo Verdean man who’d come to Lisbon for a master’s degree and then decided to stay. We bonded over a shared love for the quiet, muted intensity of South African author J.M. Coetzee’s prose, and Amsfgoro introduced me to the work of José Eduardo Agualusa, the first Portuguese-language author I felt comfortable reading in the original. Yuri, who’d come from Cabo Verde on a student visa, gave me invaluable advice for navigating the perils of Portuguese immigration bureaucracy and taught me that I was not the only one feeling quagmired. I had been told to extend my tourist visa for an additional three months while I waited for my citizenship application to process, for instance, but the wait time for such an appointment was almost as long as the length of my original tourist visa: 88 days. It turned out that countless basketball friends had found themselves in this semilegal purgatory: technically legal in Portugal, but worried or unable to leave for fear of negative visa repercussions. Knowing that I wasn’t the only one gave me some solace.

It should come as no surprise that the Campo was also the site of my biggest Portuguese breakthroughs. As we were packing up one summer evening, I got to talking with João, a Brazilian exchange student studying engineering. After I stumbled over the Portuguese word for it—enghenharia—he started laughing. “Oh shit, you aren’t Portuguese! I always figured you were from here.”

Some of João’s mix-up surely had to do with the kind of Portuguese required for pick-up basketball. It’s easy to disguise an insufficiently nasally diphthong or an overzealous shhhh sound at the end of a word when the only phrases one really needs are jeers like Lança! Vamo jogar, então? and Tás a brincar comigo ou que? But his accidental vote of confidence made me feel like I’d achieved what I’d set out to do. Though my preference for rougher, more physical play and my tendency to “travel” (according to European rules, at least) might still quickly give me away as being from the United States, my speech now revealed that my connection to Portugal was more complicated.

Several years later, after I’d returned home to California comfortably fluent in Portuguese, I made the trip back to Lisbon. When I arrived, I found many of my non-basketball friends had moved on—Europeans to their home country, Portuguese to the sleepy coastlines of Setúbal or rainy Porto, digital nomads to chase Germany’s elusive freelancer visa or try to get in early on Estonia’s burgeoning startup scene. But when I showed up to the Campo on a random Wednesday evening, I was greeted by the same familiar faces, now with a few extra gray hairs, and more knee sleeves to keep temperamental ACLs warm. There were new faces, too, but returning a few days later, I could already understand who preferred to roll to the basket and who stayed behind the three-point line.

The beauty of the Campo is this continuity: turnover happens, but the community endures. It’s a wonderful feeling, knowing that you can return to a place and, if you’re willing to wait until next game, there’ll be a spot for you. In some way, this describes my relationship to my family in Portugal, too. Even as younger relatives graduate from high school and older ones retire, and as those pricey international calls have been replaced by WhatsApp, someone familiar will always be on the other end of the line. A shared language means the relationship will endure.

As Portugal continues to shift and evolve—post-dictatorship, post-recession—one thing feels certain to me: the Campo’s stability and its open-doors policy. As the group’s Facebook page reminds players: “Convidamos TODA A GENTE a APARECER,” EVERYONE is invited to SHOW UP.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> The Best Basketball Court in Lisbon appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“You’re lucky to have freeways—when I was a kid, we didn’t have freeways,” she used to say.

But that didn’t stop my brother and me from whining about congestion on the 10 during long drives to see her relatives in Redlands. She’d respond to our complaints with the Southern California version of “when I was your age, I had to walk six miles through the snow.”

“I grew up in Hawthorne,” a working-class town near LAX, she’d remind us, “and when we went to Redlands, we had to go via Imperial Highway and other surface streets.” In her telling, the trip took three hours.

Mom is 75 now, and her memory isn’t great. But I’ve never forgotten her story, and for years I’ve wondered what such a trip would be like. So, with her encouragement—she’s a retired newspaper editor who taught me the old journalists’ adage, “if your mother says she loves you, check it out”—I decided to do the reporting. I would drive from Hawthorne to the Inland Empire city of Redlands without getting on a freeway.

The drive would trigger memories, inspire emotions, and serve as a reminder how, when you’re traveling in California, time can slow down even as it hurtles ahead.

I start near Imperial Highway’s western end in El Segundo, from the former site of the North American Aviation plant where Grandma Edith, my mom’s mom, once worked the assembly line. From that spot, I see the office building that is now home to the L.A. Times, the paper my mom and I both worked for when it was headquartered in downtown L.A. From El Segundo, the highway proceeds underneath the 105 Freeway, which effectively replaced Imperial as an east-west thoroughfare when it opened in 1993.

Imperial Highway—really a collection of four- and six-lane county roads and state highways, with stoplights—was first conceived of a century ago by agricultural and business interests who wanted to connect L.A. with farms around Brawley, 220 miles southeast in Imperial County.

But building infrastructure was never easy in this state of too-many local jurisdictions; construction on the highway got started in 1931 but wasn’t finished until 1961. The Imperial Highway my mom and her parents relied on in the 1950s and ’60s slowly became obsolete as long stretches of the highway were replaced or subsumed by other freeways and highways. Today, Imperial Highway doesn’t come within 100 miles of Imperial County; its eastern end is at the border of Anaheim and the city of Orange.

Heading east from El Segundo on Imperial, I stop immediately in Hawthorne, at a small apartment building that occupies the lot where my mom grew up. I also swing by the monument to the Beach Boys, whom my mom knew at Hawthorne High School. From Hawthorne, Imperial passes briefly through Inglewood and then makes its way through South Los Angeles, the section of Southern California that has changed the most, and most consistently drawn my attention, throughout my career.

Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

To drive Imperial Highway today is to see Southern California as an unhealthy empire, at war with itself. There are more check cashing places than banks, and more liquor stores, fast-food restaurants, donut shops, and smoke shops than I can count, most in small strip malls with names like “Imperial Plaza.” Their sun-splashed marquees mix with newer health clinics and gleaming schools—public, charter, private, and religious—often fenced off.

This streetscape reflects dueling impulses. Will health care and education save us before we eat and drink ourselves to death?

Just as in the rest of California, there is not enough new housing here. Homes along Imperial are often stucco and mid-century, their ugliness hidden behind uglier walls that block the traffic noise. The two public housing projects I pass—Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts—are in better shape than the apartments and motels around them.

East of South L.A., after grabbing a burrito at Plaza de Mexico mall in Lynwood, I can’t help but stop when I see the street sign for Gary Beverly Court outside of an empty Lynwood High School building. The high school has moved, but the street sign remains, in honor of a beloved principal who was shot to death on his drive home 20 years ago. I covered the case, which remains haunting and unsolved.

With a multi-car accident blocking Imperial ahead, I take a mile-long detour south into Compton, which allows me to visit the tombs of my great-grandparents. When I return to the road, I head through South Gate, and battle traffic. The retail shops become more frequent and more middlebrow in Downey. There, a sign points me in the direction of the museum memorializing the Columbia Space Shuttle, which my grandmother helped assemble later in her aerospace career.

Traffic is slow in Norwalk, with county government buildings and churches that have taken over old hotels, auditoriums, and restaurants. The drivers go so fast in Santa Fe Springs and La Mirada, the last two L.A. County cities Imperial runs through, that I move over to the slower right-hand lane.

Forty-one miles in, when I cross into Orange County in La Habra, Imperial looks more prosperous. There are a couple of tech firm offices, as well as high-end retailers, gyms and yoga studios full of pretty people, and an Amazon Fresh. I push through Brea into Yorba Linda for a bit, and see a few horse trails, along with signs for the Nixon library, devoted to the only California-born president, a kid from Whittier who weirdly embodied the promise and paranoia of his home state.

My total drive time, not counting stops, has reached two hours. And Imperial Highway would only get me halfway to Redlands, in the northeast corner of the L.A. basin that is part of San Bernardino County.

So, I turn north and head through Brea Canyon on a dusty, traffic-crammed road paralleling the 57 Freeway. Upon reaching the San Gabriel Valley, I take surface streets in a northeast direction through Diamond Bar, Pomona, and Claremont—passing a familiar mix of fast-food joints and donuts and schools.

Without a map, I drive in search of Base Line, where I’ll turn eastward. It’s the road my mom remembers most from those long-ago drives.

It also was once among the most important routes in all of California.

Indeed, Base Line is older than almost everything now standing in the Los Angeles basin. In the 1850s, U.S. government surveyors, charged with establishing an “initial point” for Southern California surveys (they chose Mt. San Bernardino), established a north-south meridian line and an east-west baseline to guide future surveys.

That baseline became Baseline, which today goes by various names—Base Line or Baseline, Baseline Avenue or Baseline Street, or, in Upland, 16^th Street. At the point beyond Claremont where I reach Baseline, I find a dustier, less dense version of Imperial Highway, with three lanes and too many liquor stores, but with more parks and trees and vacant lots. Just as the 105 Freeway shadows Imperial, the 210 tracks the Baseline corridor it replaced over the past two generations.

The housing is newer here—my mom recalls the Base Line as a strip of development and services, running largely through groves and farms. But the buildings seem sun-bleached and in need of repair—a reminder that California’s housing stock is older than that of the Rust Belt states.

I head through Upland, with ranch houses and a few parks, and then into Rancho Cucamonga, which seems to have an abundance of dental practices along Baseline. “Why all the dentists?” I ask myself, before answering my own question: it’s all the donut shops!

I am through Etiwanda and into Fontana before I spot new housing construction, a development calling itself “The Encore at Providence,” which sounds like the last song before the show ends and you get your audience with God.

But then in Rialto, Baseline becomes a divide. On the south side are homes, protected by sound walls. On the north side are warehouses. These facilities grow more massive as I move further east; the “Now Hiring” signs on their walls also get bigger as I head deeper into the Inland Empire, now an American center for logistics.

Sidewalks are replaced by dust, and the landscape gets browner, except for the brilliant green colors of Eisenhower High School. I feel like I’m in the country, with things spread out—until I cross the 215 and enter the west side of San Bernardino.

To this point, the roads have been relatively smooth, but San Bernardino is a poor city, even after emerging from one of America’s worst municipal bankruptcies in 2017. Baseline here is full of ruts and potholes, and my Prius bounces up and down. Many of the storefronts are empty. Even in the Inland Empire, one of California’s fastest-growing areas, San Bernardino seems stagnant; it’s been eclipsed by its inland urban rival, Riverside, which has grown faster and richer since the 1980s.

I’ve been driving for more than three hours, and I’m getting close to my destination. I head through the city of Highland, home of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, who sponsor the new event space back in L.A. that the media nonprofit for which I now work helps program. I drive a few miles past their newly renamed casino and I’m in East Highlands, where my grandmother, great-grandmother and other relatives worked in the orange groves and packing houses after arriving from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl.

Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

The packing company provided a small green house for the family to live in here in East Highlands; that’s where my mom was heading from Hawthorne six decades ago. That green house, in a line of houses once known as the Green Row, is long gone, but I find the spot, on a hillside in a planned community.

Baseline dead-ends at an orange grove, which provides a bit of agricultural respite, and beauty, between the development and a dry hillside crisscrossed with hiking trails. Many of the oranges lay unpicked, rotting on the ground.

My great aunt and uncle, Fern and Don, remain in Redlands, near the 800-square-foot house my great-grandparents saved up to buy and which we would visit on those traffic-choked drives on the 10. I turn south, taking Orange Street through the Redlands downtown and up to the retirement community where Fern and Don now live.

More than eight hours have passed since I started. My total drive time, excluding stops, has been more than four hours. But the journey has felt even longer, with time moving in reverse as I retrace my mom’s family drives from six decades ago, and follow thoroughfares that date to the mid-19^th and early 20^th centuries.

After navigating the community’s COVID checks, I knock on my aunt and uncle’s door. I hug Fern, and spend a half hour arguing good-naturedly with Don about what he’s watching on Fox News. But I am eager to get home, without delay.

In less than five minutes of driving, I’m on the 10, heading west toward L.A. This drive will take me only 90 minutes, because of some traffic around West Covina. The route is not particularly scenic. But as I drive home, I suddenly feel fresher and renewed—with new memories of Southern California surface streets, and with my mother’s enduring gratitude for our freeways.

The post Why I Drove 80 Miles Across Southern California on Surface Streets appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The level of stress we feel can be harder to cut than a Butterball turkey: Not only are we homing in on the family dinner table where so much that has determined us has happened, but this Diwali or Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or Christmas feast is a kind of recurring dream (or nightmare, as the case may be). We may not be thinking about it, but we are keeping the dead alive with each family reunion and culinary tradition. We are keeping customs so longstanding that we barely know their origins.

No wonder we feel a little crazy around the holidays.

And we continue to celebrate the pull of family ties even as they unravel, sometimes quite noticeably, all around us. It may seem as if our family identities are experiencing a forced reboot where preferred pronouns, critical race theory debates, and a million other powder kegs threaten to blow up the system—even before the turkey gets carved. We feel our present moment is especially fraught, even though our predecessors sometimes literally stepped through minefields to make their way home to hearth and family, even when it meant sitting across from John Birchers, segregationists, religious bigots, and worse.

Still, this year’s feast may seem like the last straw. Was it ever thus, or have we finally come to the family tipping point? Will this be our last supper before the great cancelling? Knowing the carnage to come, should we even come home at all? Are the ties that bind stronger than the tribalistic othering of our extended family’s persecutions?

Has coming home for the holidays become the definition of craziness?

We are likely to never know our whole family story, and we are probably lucky that we don’t—but it’s all still there underneath the silt of Time, affecting our actions and relationships through the sediment in unexpected ways. We are related to and loved by individuals who have survived wars and other global catastrophes just to get here, who have made choices and espoused beliefs antithetical to everything we care about, who may barely condone our life choices, and yet who share our blood. This is the primordial ooze that glazes our table’s honey-baked ham.

Indeed, we are indentured to family; it’s in the word itself—family. The Latin famulus is a servant or slave, and the historical idea of family goes beyond lineage to estate, property, and the collective value of a domestic household. We may adhere to it or rebel from it, but we will always have its mark on us.

The faddish interest in family trees and finding our roots makes sense, not only in trying to get beyond what we already know of parents and grandparents, but in helping us determine a narrative thread amid what is otherwise a tangle of opposing family values. Sepia photos seem less controversial than the talking heads on Fox or MSNBC. Perhaps genetic ancestry can bring us all together and off the firing line.

DNA may not lie—but what does it all really tell us? What meanings can we cobble together from racial and ethnic percentages on pie charts? What does a ship’s manifest really say about the long-lost antecedent emigrating from pogrom or famine? Perhaps it connects us to world history writ large enough to read in the dark. But the family mystery remains: Who were they really? Would they have understood me? Sure, we’re family, but might we have been friends? And beneath the old-world fashions and foreign names, what secret madness were they hiding?

Out of this fundament of doubt arises the family play. Of course, the genre exists also on film and in novels, but on stage the family play has grown roots so deep that they intertwine with the electrics and the plumbing and threaten to raise the floorboards. It would seem that the theater was made for teasing out the knots of ancestry one sin at a time.

We Americans are particularly good at dramatizing such narrative threads, but we certainly don’t own the rights. The Mahabharata, the immense Sanskrit epic about cousins who go to war over politics, sexism, and immorality penned by Srila Vyasadeva and Ganesha, recounts events from more than 5,000 years ago, 2,500 years before Oedipus Rex appeared. In the intervening millennia we have been inundated with families misbehaving in ways we can’t unsee. But you don’t have to carve your own eyes out of your head to get the underlying point: The families on stage are extreme versions of the ones we go home to.

In this moment of trigger warnings, let it be said that all family plays are triggers and that good plays trigger with intent. They zero in on past trauma and make it present and immediate. They cause a very specific kind of emotional distress: The audience, transported by memory, may find itself unable to remain present in the moment—yet it cannot look away, it cannot press pause.

Birthrights, grudges, feuds, illicit unions, and deeply buried secrets keep us watching even when we don’t want to. According to my mother, my own father sat watching all four acts of Eugene O’Neill’s great mid-century play Long Day’s Journey into Night while obsessively gnawing the skin off the cuticle of his thumb. Did he recognize his own mother in the doomed Mary Tyrone? Did Mary’s doomed son Edmund’s psychic stress reflect his own love/hate relationship to a family torn apart by the American Depression?

I wish I could have asked him. But when I am gnawing at my own thumb while writing my own versions of the family play, I realize that writers are, in a way, cannibals when we attempt to tell the tale of those who came before, tearing at themselves in the piteous search for the narrative thread. Mary Tyrone was not my father’s mother, nor was Edmund my father. Yet somehow, they trod the same narrative path with my father over the same Donner Pass in the dead of bleak midwinter. And watching it made him chew his own flesh.

But it doesn’t always have to be like that. In 1931, Thornton Wilder wrote The Long Christmas Dinner, a play where 90 years go by without a pause in the action. This is a narrative thread on an epic scale yet told in just a few scant minutes. Life courses come and go without fanfare but with love. Characters enter from a portal decorated with fruit and flowers and exit through another hung with black velvet. They age in front of us with little or no physical alteration, and the audience must examine a life span all at once.

The result is funny and tragic, often at the same time. Although no specific dialogue presages the specific rancor of our political tribalism, we get the sense that the holiday table is a place where family unloads upon one another their frustrations and fears—same as it ever was. “Every last twig is wrapped around with ice. You almost never see that,” remarks the unofficial family historian of the play and the character most aware of Time passing, Young Genevieve, not knowing that her mother observed the same thing years before, and that her daughter-in-law will make the same remark years from now at the same table. But, thanks to the telescoped nature of the piece, the audience remembers. They can’t forget, and they wouldn’t want to.

We are all the crazy children of parents too difficult to forget. Nature, nurture, love, damage: It’s all there at the family dinner table, somewhere between the rice and peas and the alcohol, and sometimes it might seem like it’s just too much to bear—especially when the narrative thread gets frayed.

Plays are both prompts and provocations. They point to the madness of our ancestors to help us understand the instabilities of our own lives, tendrils of triggering hostilities growing deep down just under the festive tablecloth. We differ more by degree than kind; we may share DNA or the scars of war, but at least we have perspective, as Shakespeare tells us, “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

Whether in the hands of Sophocles, O’Neill, Wilder, or the scores of other playwrights, the family play helps us see that aside from the birthing and the dying, our experiences are not all that different from each other’s. We are all a little crazy and a lot unforgettable. It is quite literally all in the family. The madness is both intrafamilial and interfamilial. Whatever madness awaits you at home for the holidays, not only will you get through it, but you’ll likely see—or have already seen—aspects of it on stage at some point. Perhaps your reflection will help you get through the next meal amongst those who made you what you are.

The post Theater Understands Your Holiday Dinner Angst appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our mission is to connect people to ideas and to each other, which is why we have chosen to honor authors who explore these themes for over a decade. In 2022, as we rediscover and reinvigorate public spaces after many months of isolation, we look forward to learning from some of the top thinkers from around the world, and to bringing our winner and audience together at a live event that will be convened both online and in-person. Zócalo is grateful to screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney for his continuing sponsorship of our literary prize program, which also includes the Zócalo Poetry Prize.

Because community is such a vast subject that can be explored in myriad ways, we accept submissions on a broad array of topics and themes from many fields and disciplines. The 11 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients come from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and scholarship. They range from historians and journalists to political scientists and philosophers. Previous winners have studied a single location (whether that’s Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during the Jim Crow era or an Eastern European border town in the centuries leading up to the Holocaust) as well as phenomena including cooperation, technology, and morality.

As with everything else Zócalo features, we are on the lookout for that rare combination of brilliance and clarity, excellence and accessibility.

The author of the winning book will receive $10,000 and speak at a public program, including an award ceremony, lecture, and interview, in Los Angeles in spring 2022. We will also be announcing and honoring the authors of books on our short list. For more information about the prize, please contact us at bookprize@zocalopublicsquare.org.

The deadline to submit this year is October 29, 2021. Please send a single copy of any books nominated for the prize, along with a submission letter containing publisher or author contact information and publication date, to:
Zócalo Public Square
c/o Book Prize Committee
1111 South Broadway
Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Our past winners are:

• Jia Lynn Yang for One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 (W. W. Norton & Company)
• William Sturkey for Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
• Omer Bartov for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster)
• Michael Ignatieff for The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Harvard University Press)
• Mitchell Duneier for Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sherry Turkle for Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Press)
• Danielle Allen for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing)
• Ethan Zuckerman for Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon)
• Richard Sennett for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press)
• Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time (Perigee Books)

The post The 2022 Zócalo Book Prize Celebrates Human Connectedness appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I chatted on the phone with my father in California weeks before my trip to Oregon, he said that the roll-out overseas, as reported by friends, was chaotic. I could hear the frustration in his voice, and concern for those close to us. People with money and means were vaccinated, while our friends and family who are teachers continued to wait patiently for their shot. I began regularly scanning the global news headlines for public health updates, lingering over relatives’ social media postings, and direct messaging my cousins to get a read of the temperature on the ground.

As an American-born Taiwanese, it took me 20 years and five visits to develop my own relationship to Taiwan. After my first visit in 1998, I went back over and over again to better understand how Taiwan, an island that has continually been occupied by outside presences, has its own unique character as a country, and how all of this has shaped my parents’ identities, and in turn, my own.

Before my first visit, I knew Taiwan through photographs. Nearly 20 years passed between my father’s departure from Taiwan and his return to his hometown of Chingshui in the 1990s to make offerings at his parents’ gravesites. I was in high school at the time, and when he came back home to Southern California, he brought video footage of Chingshui and photographs of our living family members. I saw images of the ramshackle remains of the Japanese colonial-style home where my father grew up, and a black-and-white image of the rock-lined, communal washing pool where my grandmother took my father as a child to clean clothes for the family. In other photos, I saw the village columbarium and its urns filled with ancestor bones ready to be buried underground. These images came to hold emotional memories for me in photographs long before I ever set foot on Taiwanese soil.

Snapshot of the author’s father (wearing a cardigan sweater) at Queen’s Head Rock. Courtesy of Shin Yu Pai

During my first visit home in 1998, my cousin Paula pulled out a box of black-and-white snapshots I’d never seen before—images from my father’s young adulthood. A series of pictures captured my father and his third eldest brother, who gave me my Chinese name, picnicking on a beach with friends. My father wore a cardigan sweater over a button-down shirt and dark pants, while resting an umbrella over his shoulder. Two photos stood out. One is a candid image of the scene someone snapped before it was done being composed. My father, his brother, and their friend stand looking at the camera before they are fully arranged, paused in a moment of time as throngs of tourists, and even a small child in the arms of a visitor, crowd the frame. And then there was the final photo in the pile, in which the young men gaze steadily into the camera’s lens while posing in front of a distinctive rock shaped like a woman’s profile. Fascinated by the image of the pockmarked rock, I asked my relatives about its origins. I was told that the photo had been taken in Yehliu Geopark, and that the formation was called Queen’s Head Rock.

By the time I got to Yehliu to explore the headlands where my father walked, it was 2006. My cousin drove me to the northern coast to visit the popular geological park. In the years since my father’s visit, a wooden boardwalk had been built to redirect visitors and flow traffic away from Queen’s Head Rock to other hoodoo stones on the promontory. But on this day, the promontory was fairly unpopulated, and we didn’t have any difficulty moving from one stone feature to the next. Many of the rocks have whimsical names like “Fairy Shoe,” “Beehive,” and “Sea Candles,” though some of the names are quite a stretch of the imagination, and it takes some creativity on the viewer’s part to see the resemblance. But the connection between “Queen’s Head Rock” and its formation was unmistakable. Its mushroom-shaped form tapered into a neck-like structure—thinner now due to erosion than it was in my father’s photos—that radiated outward in the shape of a human head. The back of the head was elongated as if the woman wore a headdress, which made the rock feel almost Egyptian in its form.

I returned to see Queen’s Head Rock a second time, when my husband came from Texas to join me in Taiwan. I wanted him to see and know a place in my family history. We took photos in front of the personal landmark, and I filed them away with the vintage image of my dad that I’d digitized on my computer.

Then, in 2012, I accompanied my father back to Taiwan to visit relatives and to revisit an outlying island where he had carried out his military service. When my dad’s friends suggested a day trip up to Yehliu, I readily agreed to a third visit, as I wanted to photograph my father next to Queen’s Head Rock, as he had posed nearly 50 years before.

Ever since my years as a student at the University of Washington, the work of John Stamets, who taught at the university before his death in 2014, has continued to influence my eye as a photographer, even though I never studied with him personally. Stamets specialized in architectural photography and a method called “rephotography” in which he recreated historical scenes of past and present pictures. Through these images of then and now, the image-maker registers the evolution of a changing environment and the people in it.

When we arrived at Queen’s Head Rock in 2012, much had changed. To protect the site, the park had installed a ring of smaller stones around Queen’s Head Rock, so that visitors could no longer get close to her. And unlike my past visits, this time, hundreds of tourists crawled the headlands, queuing up on the wooden boardwalk for their turn to take a selfie. My father complained bitterly about the heat as he progressed through the line, but dutifully posed as I asked when it was our turn to take a photograph. A park attendant blew his whistle to signify when our time with the rock was over. Keep moving!

The author and her father with friends, Queen’s Head Rock. Courtesy of Shin Yu Pai

I already knew the images would not be the same, though I snapped photos of my father with his friends as well as pictures of him standing alone near the rock. That’s all I could manage before we were waved off the boardwalk. My father was too overheated to entertain posing as he had five decades before, and we were too pressed for time for me to properly compose the shot to mimic what had been photographed before. I felt weepy at being rushed off, disappointed that my father couldn’t understand why the act of photography in that moment should matter anymore than the usual tourist selfie. Traveling with my father is often fraught with unmet need and conflicting agendas. But I had imbued that unrealized photo with the qualities of an imaginative touchstone, a document of our relational continuity and evidence that my father and I were there together, walking through different histories and reaching across time and place to meet one another in the present.

Entering a John Stamets photo is a bit like going back in time. The eye and mind naturally look for the places of continuity, no matter what has changed in the foreground. As viewers, we gravitate toward what has stayed the same, while recognizing what has been lost forever, most often through human intervention. These images can be surprising, enduring, and an exercise in documenting something that by definition often eludes the eye: absence. When I look at my own archive and the places that I have revisited time and time again, I notice that a tree is missing, a pergola is gone, or that an iconic stone has been worn down by the decades.

Gazing out at the ocean from the western most point in the State of Oregon, I thought about my last remaining uncle, my cousins, and their children quarantining at home. I pictured, too, the marine debris from Japan’s 2011 tsunami that washed its way all the way to the Pacific Coast. These distances of place and time both are and aren’t as far as they seem. Sea water and wind conditions will continue to batter the geological formations at Yehliu, causing the neck of Queen’s Head Rock to continue to thin. Queen’s Head Rock will become so fragile that it finally breaks, or crumbles as a result of an earthquake or human touch. I grieved its impermanence as I stared at the sea stacks along the Pacific Coast, feeling the distance between.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> The Headlands of Yehliu appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.