Story Collecting

During the last portion of my undergraduate degree in writing, I decided to take an interpersonal communications class. Among all the things I learned, familial story telling intrigued me the most. I learned that families could become close-knit by telling each other their stories. A close-knit family is something I have craved since I was a kid. Both sides of my family are spread across the country, literally, and none of us keep in regular, open contact, let alone tell stories about our lives to each other. We know little about each other over our impressions of who we are. The impressions are something, certainly, but without experience of another, there is no or little rapport.

I want a rapport with my family members. Because of this want and this knowledge that stories can build family closeness, I decided to take another class about writing biographies. I had an urge to become a story collector, to compile the stories into a volume for my family members to share. I wanted to contact my aunties and uncles, what grandparents were left, and have conversations with their great-great grandchildren. This became overwhelming to me, not only because of the long lists that began accumulating in my mind of persons with whom I wanted to contact, but because those I contacted were hesitant, closed, almost unwilling to share the stories that I asked for. I related that we could just remember the good things, the happy times, fun quirks and tall tales if there were any, but the hesitancy remained. I was even told to just "make stuff up."

I almost gave up then. Of course, I needed to complete my assignments for the class, else fail, so I inserted some fiction.

During that time, I consulted my mother a lot. Out of all the people I interviewed, she was the most open to share. In fact, she gushed. I couldn't keep up, and I had to call back many times with questions to fill in the gaps.

I know that my Mom wants to write a book sometime about her life, and I think she should do so. I am not sure if she has put word to pages, yet. I do know that she is eager every time I call to ask her about her memories. Because of my mother's eagerness, I decided to start a series of interviews and poems related to her stories. It's a way for both of us to satisfy something. I can deepen the relationship between my mother and I through story telling, and we together can begin putting her life to pages.

Sometimes I feel as if I am doing something wrong, that she should begin her book, and I should leave her stories untouched until she is ready to write them. The trouble with someone else writing your stories, is that there will always be another filter through which the story is being told.

One example is the first poem of the collection I am writing for my Mom from her stories, called "Mermaid," which documents some images from her time in Okinawa during the Vietnam war. My mother commented to me that her time in Okinawa was one of the happiest times in her life. It wasn't enough for me to document the images she related as just that. I applied my own irony, my own filter, and then published the work.

The poem was published last year in the online poetry magazine called Pirene's Fountain, and follows:

Mermaid

When Mom wasn’t making cakes
or practicing her off island dialect
of Japanese to the scowling market ladies,
when she wasn’t taking classes on ikebana,
when my sister and I were not at school
on the Kadena air force base,
she drove us across Okinawa.
We’d hang out of the windows,
hair plastered to our necks, enthralled
by green on green, terraces and vineyards and jungles
green, women with baskets on their heads
traveling down the road in their bare feet.
We passed cart-driven men, their ox carrying
bundles of sugarcane. We left them in dust,
giggled as we passed, waved and smiled,
pointed until Mom made us stop.

These were the best times for me:
When the car arrived at the reef,
after we’d seen the oranges, yellows,
and the reds of the sun setting over the water,
after fried chicken and Nehi soda,
after the first sighting of stars,
we hunted cowries with our flashlights,
the drying starfish and conk shells there.
We found shells nicked by seagull beaks,
with something inside of them, still living.
We found sea glass, coins, trinkets, sand
dollars and oyster shells.

One night there was a woman
balanced on a rock over the water.
She was just sitting there, running
a comb through her impossible length
of hair. At first I thought
her a mermaid, but her feet
folded to her side like arms
hugging in close. Her tattered
skirt and ill-fitted blouse
waved in the cooling night.
Her hair, greyed-black, whipped
at the rock, just as the air force jets
sped across the sky on their courses
to and from Vietnam.

She became a silhouette against the sunset,
etched behind my eyes, forever.