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A new conversation: Behind the Menu Status Updates

Dear Colleen,
I’ve been thinking a lot about your latest post, “Friend to Foodies.” I like to think that you wrote much of it with a gently mocking affection for your foodie friends, me included.

I am guilty of much of what you describe: homemade jam (check) and cakes (check); farmer’s markets (check); reusable shopping bag, (check, but recycled plastic); Facebook status updates advertising what we are eating for dinner (check). Here’s the passage that I thought about the most:

“But alas, foodies are indeed everywhere. And now, thanks to social media, I get to hear what all of you food enthusiasts are up to, which is like 90% cool, and 10% annoying because you make it sound so effortless, like you are lazily sipping on chardonnay, throwing together ingredients from your garden for your adoring friends and loved ones…who will clap as you plate the food.”

I wanted to talk about the 10% annoying part a bit, because I recognize that feeling. I think this part says a lot about how we think about ourselves as working parents, as working mothers, and a lot about what’s not said. There are so many ways to judge ourselves and each other.

See, what struck me about these two identities, working parent and eater/foodie, is that both involve an endless daily supply of incredibly personal decisions. Most of us try the best we can. We try to make our lifestyle reflect our values and priorities, but we can’t be successful in every single decision that we make. The academic in me, heck, even the writer in me, says that there are larger conversations to be had. So, let’s talk about the menu status updates first.

Confession #1: In my household we make time to cook, and grocery shop, but far less time to clean.

I know my menu updates on Facebook might sound, as menus do, like lovely descriptions. But, like menus and status updates, they are just the tip of the iceberg lettuce of life. Some of our meals do take a fair amount of work, and preparation, and hours of grocery shopping, all of which I enjoy most days of the week. I’m lucky that I love cooking and grocery shopping; I can’t imagine how difficult home cooking would feel if I didn’t.

Sometimes the menu status updates are elaborate because the meals do take a great deal of time and preparation. Arroz con pollo is one of our favorite meals, but it takes at least a couple of hours and several stages, involving chopping, marinating, simmering, and baking. On some days I wonder why I succumb to my craving for elaborate or time-intensive dishes, if I have to cook them.

But more often than not, the menu status updates are my ways to focus and meditate: a space to find calm and quiet amidst the whirl of activity that is our house between 4 and 7 PM most days. On good days, this might involve gleeful screams, an ABBA dance party, and several thundering laps around our dining room, kitchen, living room, and hallway. On not-so-good days, this might involve several tearful pleas for “chocky milk,” or just one more Bugs Bunny cartoon, or the clattering of fifty plastic blocks from the Duplo table. Most days are a healthy mix of both. Writing a menu status update can be my therapeutic reminder that I’m looking forward to a good meal, and that makes me happy.

So these status updates help me to relax. But they also mean that the more time I am cooking and baking, the less time I am cleaning. I know people don’t usually status-update a beautifully clean living room, but when I see those living rooms in houses I visit, especially those houses where people have small children, I think about how effortless they seem.

And that’s when I understand the “90% cool, 10% annoying” ratio. These living rooms look amazing. I envy their peace. But how do these families time find to keep it clean? Like you, I envy, but my envy involves that mythical clean and organized family who never has to clear off the table before they eat; who stores every toy in its original box in its proper basket on its designated shelf; who never finds pretzel crumbs and dried cranberries in their sofa cushions. My house is, let’s just say, far from immaculate. We make lots of time to cook, with family expeditions to various grocery stores, but far less time to clean.

I have similar feelings about the crafty–mom blogs that I read. I love seeing what these women create, and yet I wonder how they have enough time and energy, much less a clear-enough workspace.  Doesn’t it make you feel better when, occasionally, the cracks show through the seemingly perfect narrative? When they admit that they too, need time to breathe?

I have more confessions to make “behind the status updates” (I’m a picky eater! My kids are kind of picky, too! I use convenience foods along with from-scratch foods!). For now, though, I wanted to know what you thought about this column, “Busy Signal: The Very Busy Home Cook.” I loved so much of what Pete Wells had to say: what time constraints and energy levels look like in households with several small children and two working parents, what houses look like where the breadwinners’ work does not get “left at the office.” I loved the idea of not shaming “those who do not have the time to cook,” and I even loved the idea of better processed food.

I know that there are privileges in our two-income lifestyle. (Kudos to the single parents out there. A fist-bump to all those folks looking for a job. Gratitude to those who volunteer and work at places like food banks.) And yet with all due respect, I wondered if folks would have responded differently had Wells been a working mother writing this line: “I have definitely learned something about cooking for a family at the end of a day spent in an office: It’s very, very hard to do.” Would it have had the same impact?

I look forward to hearing more about what you have to say about this combination of issues, about working and parenting and home cooking. I don’t hold myself up as a model worker or parent or home cook, but maybe there are a few anecdotes or strategies I can offer, or things that our commenters can offer. And maybe that conversation can help everybody. And I hope you’ll do the same.

–Tamiko

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In praise of bulbs

Since moving to the Pacific Northwest some thirteen years ago, I’ve come to appreciate bulbs. Not the light kind, the flower kind.

Though my California childhood house had a big yard in the front, I can’t say that I grew up gardening. In the front of the house we had two pine trees nestled in a huge patch of ivy next to the carport, facing a hedge of bay leaf trees. We had persimmon and orange trees. Lots of greenery, but my sister and I didn’t really garden. I remember a patch of marigolds that we tried to grow in our backyard, but they didn’t do very well.

Gardening’s something that I came to know more in the Pacific Northwest. It’s one of the most popular pastimes here. People in our neighborhood care about their yards, about terracing and native plants and lawns. This makes us sound like a region of senior citizens, I know—with all due love and respect to any seniors reading here—but it does make for some lovely city neighborhood living.

See, we have a true spring in the Northwest. After months and months of early darkness, of pewter skies turning to charcoal, we gravitate towards bright color wherever and whenever we can find it. Our grocery store sells primroses these days, to help us remember what fuchsia, violet, and daffodil look like outside. Last week, I found myself silently thanking the anonymous person (or force of nature) who planted a tiny patch of yellow crocuses along my running trail. Oh, thank goodness, spring’s coming. We can start counting down to the light.

Spring, when it comes, is a gorgeous thing here. Apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, plum blossoms yield showers of petals washing onto the streets in frothy tides. Daffodils stretching their necks, russet dahlias blooming like fireworks, pink camellias unfurling their ruffly skirts. And then, when the sun’s out: vibrant colors against blue-silver skies and silver-blue water. Spring is when I breathe in all that color, all that light. Some days I can’t believe I get to live here.

Yet it’s the bulbs that I’ve been thinking about lately, perhaps as a way to describe what’s been happening here on the blog. I’m still learning about bulbs, but I understand that they often lie dormant for seasons. Some people pack them away in their garages, in the wintertime. If you’ve ever seen bulbs, you know that some of them are rather unsightly. No symmetry, no smoothly self-contained packaging like a seed. They’re gnarled, and knotty, and even brown-papery in places where dead foliage might have order ventolin online uk been. You might even think, “Really? Something beautiful’s going to come out of here?” Bulbs are something like the Ugly Duckling of plants. In the spring you have to plant them, trusting that they will grow quickly with the sunlight, and eventually explode into color. Their blooming sneaks up on you, and almost before you know it, a cluster of red tulips have returned in your yard, the tulips that you planted from last year’s Mother’s Day present.

That’s how I’ve been feeling about writing lately: unglamourously, unpoetically, something like a bulb. After the start of a new semester, and a series of minor colds in the family house, the book project is coming off of the back burner. Clearly, the private MFA has the perks of flexibility and sick days, but its main downside is its lack of structure and accountability. I have missed writing here and tried not to scold myself for posting less regularly. I want to keep this space as a space of pleasurable focus, at least for now. So my degree in progress has been dormant for a while, but I’m planting it again with hopes of spring. The Northwest spring allows you to do that.

We’ve got an amaryllis bulb in our kitchen, since our kindergartener C had one in her classroom. Amaryllis flowers grow well indoors, and they grow quickly. The class got to measure the growth of the stem every week. When we saw amaryllis pots at Trader Joe’s, C asked us to get one. It’s the first living plant we’ve welcomed back in the house in years. The amaryllis bloomed in late December, with red flowers like a hibiscus, at least in my range of flowers familiarity. But the flowers and leaves didn’t last for very long; we were on holiday vacation for most of that blooming. The flowers wafted pollen onto C’s bookshelf in her bedroom, and eventually their long green stems shriveled to light brown. We had to explain to her that we had to remove these parts of the plants, in order to make room for the flowers to come back.

Now I see that bulb every morning next to our kitchen table. The green stems and leaves are coming back again, and they’re growing at odd angles, reaching for that elusive Northwest February sunlight. Every few days I’ll water it, and check on it, and turn it around to straighten out the growth. That’s how I want to come back to the blog. And writing. And light.

Thanks again for returning, and reading.

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I have been asked to speak

Last week, one of my former students asked me to speak to some of her students. She’s tutoring at a middle school, close to where I live. The students I’ll be speaking to are ones who tend to slip through the cracks of the educational system; the program where my student tutors is designed to counter that slippage. Students like these—the sixth-grader who did a 6-page book report in one weekend!—are students that I care about, passionately. So I’m honored that one of my former students would ask me to talk to them. I want to talk to that sixth-grader who did her book report with such enthusiasm, to see what she and her peers might like to hear. But as a friend suggested, I also might think about what I wanted to hear when I was in eighth grade.

In eighth grade, I would never have guessed that someone would ask me to speak to eighth graders in the future. For my seventh-grade yearbook, the staff staged a picture of me staggering under an armload of every single textbook, binder, and notebook from my locker. Look how much schoolwork she does! In the picture I wore baggy jeans, not fashionably saggy or tight, and a Cosby-like sweater vest (thanks, Nick Hornby) and, more cause for squirming, let’s just say that my hair did not escape mid-80’s mulletdom.  Who wants to be the kid who’s got so much homework to do that she practically lives in a shoe? Who is willing to go on permanent record as one of those kids? Apparently, I was.

Though it was incredibly painful at the time, I am so glad that I was that kind of kid. I am glad that I managed to love school, despite how horrible I felt about myself, and my sweater vest mulletdom, my solitude at school dances, my one red Valentine’s Day carnation delivered on a day when others seemed to have dozens. I am glad that reading and writing and art stayed as elemental for me as breathing, water, food. I am glad that school did not manage to take away from me what I had loved ever since I was a child.

In fact, at least for one-seventh of my day, during seventh period, I felt that it was okay to be smart. I was in a “gifted” program for that part of the day, which supposedly made me one of the school’s “smart kids.” I know now that these programs are somewhat controversial. But we read our poems and essays to each other; we went to see professionally-produced plays; we performed in historical skits that we had written ourselves; we went on field trips where we splashed ventolin inhaler 100 mcg through tidepools and sang campfire songs under the stars. I was with students who had to be “smart” to get in, who were smarter than me, and whom I respected for being smart.

And this, it turns out, was something like how college felt. Unexpectedly, college freed me to be smart because my smartness was already assumed. It was no longer the thing that set me apart from the rest, made me strange or ridiculous or comic or unattractive. (I did lose sweater vest and the mullet, which may have helped.) Instead, smartness became the foundation from which I had to distinguish myself even further.  We were all smart. So what? What were we going to do with that? Even though the school felt huge, even though many of my classes had at least a hundred people, I was so excited to feel part of an intellectual community. The school felt too large, too diverse to have one popular community. Ideas and ideals were important. Studying was a huge part of social activity; it wasn’t something that only the nerds or the oddballs did every night, for hours. Heck, it was Berkeley—so yes, you could say that we were all nerds.

But at our best, we freed each other to be passionately intelligent. An environment like that is a gift beyond price, and I carry it with me always. I believe that every student, not just the ones whom a system has designated as “smart,” deserves this kind of community, and this kind of freedom. For me this kind of education was a privilege, but I want it to be a right.

I think I will tell the students about that.

And I will tell the students that speaking to them made me see a pattern in my own life. I have been invited to speak in a number of settings, now: academic conferences, book clubs, discussions about teaching, mentoring sessions for graduate students, public libraries, a university class about women of color and a university class about public memory, even a graduation ceremony.

I have discovered in the last two years that I like public speaking. Who knew? I like how public speaking demands me to be comfortable, to feel strong in my body and heart, as myself. I like how public speaking asks me to connect with my audience, and invite them to respond. All of those demands mean that public speaking can be the scariest place to be, but also the freest.

In eighth grade, I would never, ever have guessed that people would want to hear what I have to say.

But I have been asked to speak.

And so I have been thinking about how to prepare my voice.

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Where I start

I know I’m in trouble mentioning the word “miracle” during the holidays. I’m beyond saving if I add the word “family” to the same sentence. But I want to tell you about my family miracle.

Around 10AM on every New Year’s Day of my life, I have had breakfast with my extended family: all five of my dad’s siblings, plus my cousins and their families.  We all eat. Then we go home and cook. We return for dinner: more eating. Unlike other family reunions I’ve heard about, we don’t have T-shirts, we don’t travel anywhere exotic, and we don’t rent out a restaurant.

Longevity is part of the miracle. As far as I know, New Year’s has never been cancelled in over five decades; one year, my grandfather sold his wedding ring to make New Year’s happen. Maybe it’s because my father died over twenty-five years ago, and in some families that would mean that my link to his family died, too. Maybe I’m more aware of longevity now that I have two daughters to bring to the table.

Part of the miracle is also what I get to eat. At breakfast we’ll sip ozoni and eat its mochi, along with its shiitake mushroom, nori and shungiku. We’ll eat my uncle’s sabazushi with pickled mackerel. I can’t wait for my cousins’ carefully timed barbequed teriyaki ventolin inhaler albuterol chicken. At dinnertime we always start by lining up for Auntie Nesan’s chow mein. Another auntie brings arroz con gandules from her husband’s Puerto Rico. My Filipina mom will make lumpia; I’ll make sukiyaki using my dad’s recipe. My cousins and aunties will stuff the inari zushi and roll the maki zushi. There will be teriyaki Spam musubi, oden, crab legs, hijiki, tai, char siu, and umani. Dessert has its own table: fruit salad, pies, finger jello, multiple flavors of leche flans.

As well as we eat, I don’t want this piece to be a “savor the ethnic traditions” one. I’m also resisting the predictable family potluck cliché, about every contribution being valuable.

Yet New Year’s is miraculous: an annual family table. It is my touchstone, and what I think of first when I think of family. The meals are a staggering amount of work, the day has evolved over decades, and it will not always stay the same. Nevertheless, I’m a fairly sane and grounded person…and if anyone asks, New Year’s is where I start to tell the story of my sanity.

(I submitted this piece to a publication–they asked for a 400-word piece about “family” or “holidays.” It wasn’t published, so I get to publish it here! Happy holidays to everyone, and thanks for reading. Back in the New Year, if not before.)

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Next to the road

Dear baby bird M,

This morning I found a car rental receipt for May, 2007. I had to do a double take—the date was May 17, and I had one car seat so your older sister was with me, and I flew in and out of Sacramento…but the year was 2007. Were you born yet? I had to ask myself. No: that was one year before you were born in May 2008. About five months before we knew about you.

When I realized this, I was stunned. I can’t believe that it has only been two and a half years since you were born. Since that day, I have felt so protective of you, my second child, second daughter. Your dad and I are oldest kids, and now your big sister’s an oldest kid. You’re a youngest kid in a household of oldest kids. So I have felt protective of you in different ways. Maybe you don’t always want to play what your big sister is playing (although this is rare, it’s true); maybe you don’t want to watch that movie that she chose; maybe, gasp, you have your own choices and preferences. I want to protect yours, if I can. I understand big sister urges all too well: we want to express our love through teaching, protecting, guiding. But I want to honor you, too.

When I knew I was pregnant with you, I remember being worried. How could I love you like I love your sister? And of course, the answer was that I can’t. And I don’t. Loving your sister taught me that I could love someone differently than your dad—but just as equally, just as helplessly, just as deeply. You taught me that of course I can love a daughter differently from your sister. And yes, just as equally, just as helplessly, just as deeply.

Now, I know there are older and younger sibling gripes. Your dad and I try to manage these as best as we can. Older siblings gripe about how younger siblings get more attention for being “the baby.” But younger siblings gripe about being treated permanently like children. Older siblings gripe about having to go first, or “breaking parents in” to the first sleepover, the first driving lesson, the first time away from home. And younger siblings gripe about how little documentation there is for them, compared to the oldest child.

And oh, this last one is so true. I’ve talked to a number of parent-friends who have two or more kids, and it’s not just you. I wrote down daily, weekly, monthly things about what your sister was doing at this age. Milestones: first steps, first words, first meals. She had her own web page. We do take pictures of you, but not as many; we update your shared web site every three months, rather than every week or every month. I have felt, keenly, the lack of documentation that we have had for you, compared to what we had for your sister. It happened with me, too—there are so many picture albums of just me, the oldest and for four years, an only child—and not as many picture albums of your auntie, my younger sister. So this is something like an apology for not having enough pictures of you, or equal documentation of you.

But it is also a letter to tell you this: if the older sibling is about the magic of the milestones, the younger sibling is about the magic of the middles.

When your dad and I held your sister as a baby, we were terrified most of the time. We didn’t really know what or whom or how to trust, as parents. Good students and lifelong readers to the core, we consulted What To Expect (both before and after her birth) every week. We loved it, but we were also gut-scared.

And you? By the time you were born, we had learned better how to trust ourselves. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of my very favorite pictures in the world was taken on the day you were born. It’s a picture of you, burritoed up in the white flannel hospital blanket, and your big sister C, with the biggest look of surprise, looking up and laughing. I asked my sister, your auntie, to take these pictures, as many as she could. I knew that I’d still be in surgery for a little while after you were born. And I couldn’t be there when you met your sister for the first ventolin inhaler price time. It broke my heart a little, to tell you the truth. So first you should know this: the urge to document was there the day you were born, even though I couldn’t be with you, and the urge is still there.

And second, you should know this, immediately: very early, you taught me how to enjoy the in-between. As a baby, you were a world-class champion cuddler. Even now, your body melts into my lap, pours itself onto my shoulder. Your head still snuggles into my neck, that sweet spot that babies seem to seek and find, automatically. What will I do when you no longer want to sit on my lap in the morning during breakfast, or lounge against my legs as you eat your snack? You crave physical contact, lots of it. I’ve never been that way, but I love that hunger in you.

For the first three and half months of your life, you were colicky at around the same time, around 4-6PM. It was usually dinnertime, which meant that we had to take turns, or eat later. I never thought that I would have been mostly all right with holding a screaming, seemingly inconsolable baby, but there were also times when I was so happy that I got to hold you. I wasn’t so scared. I didn’t take it as a personal insult or parenting comment that you were screaming every day. And every once in a while, when I held you, pacing, swaying, singing, breathing deep… you’d calm down. I like to think that it was because you knew me, knew my smell, in the most mama-baby animal primal way. I wasn’t looking for your first smile, your first anything. I just knew that I loved holding you, breathing you.

Now you are making new leaps and bounds with your language, it seems almost every day. You’ve gone from naming, to demanding, to describing, to pretending, and even to analyzing (“Can I sit down to put my pants on?” you asked this morning. “It’s easier.”). You love wearing the same clothes as your older sister: “We have twins!” you like to say to her. You’re catching your balance more, and you can now trot sturdily after your sister, chirping “OK! C!” Your Japanese-manga-size eyes stare up at us from under your blowsy, curly bangs, and all three of us, we who live with you, are at their mercy. Your sister even runs to get a tissue when you sneeze.

Your moods are usually sunny or stormy, and most of the time you like to be sunny, silly and funny. I don’t remember the first time you said your first word, but I do remember when you said to me, without any kind of prompting, “I yahv yoo.” You still want to be carried a lot (“uppy!”) and you still love your “chocky milk” from the store. You love to pretend to put your baby doll to sleep, and you want us to pretend along with you. Tonight I was a crocodile. A couple of weeks ago I was the Cookie Monster. Who knows what I’ll be next? I can barely measure, much less document, when and where and how all of this is happening.

But we are learning how to express ourselves in newer and better ways, you and I. Though I can remember what life was before you were born, I am amazed by how richly you and your sister have textured my life, how thoroughly you ask me to live my life every single day. Stitches that outline a shape? Pretty, sure. But intricate embroidery in lush, multiple colors, unfurling designs: now, there’s something like my life now. A century of stitches.

That’s why I can’t believe that you’ve only been alive two and a half years.  And that’s why I’m not writing this letter to celebrate any developmental milestone. You, the younger sibling, have taught me that the journey of parenting is not only the direction of the road, the distance to the next rest stop, or the relief of the endpoint (and really, how to envision an end to parenting now?).

Thank you for teaching me to see the beauty of the landscape next to the road. You are the long tall grasses waving in the wind, the green hills relaxing in the distance, the white lace dancing on the waves.  You taught me that parenting’s also holding you, breathing you. These are the journey of parenting, as much as anything else.

Love, Mama

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For it’s 1, 2, 3…

Giants at Arlington, November 2010

It’s the bottom of the ninth.
My dad’s sitting at the best seat in town.
His black Eames Lounge chair: cushy.
An orange Giants T-shirt over
navy blue yukata: stretching.
KNBR announcers narrate: even and cool.

It’s the bottom of the ninth,
cusp of the first championship.
Foresight would only deflate.
The joy’s the anticipation.

Bottom of the ninth.
The pitch: a ball.
The pitch: a strike.

The beard.
The signs.

The pitch: sliiiider on the outside corner.
The tug. The cap.
The signs.

The pitch: a strike.
The signs.

The pitch: swing! And a miss.
The pitch: last out.

The win.
The mound.

My father, in heaven, is yelling out loud.

Baseball is stories remembering stories.
It’s the stories that bring you back.

It’s the stories that bring you back.
It’s the stories that bring you back.

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The clenched fist

So I’ve been running—no, jogging—for about five weeks now. It’s still hard for me to say that I’ve been running. It’s still incredibly hard for me to call myself a runner. Too much expectation of what a runner’s supposed to look like, and that’s just not my body type.

I never thought that I’d take up running as my cardio exercise, ever. With the quirky exception of soccer, which I love to play, running has had bad connotations for me for a very long time. The timed high school run around the practice fields, the lagging behind almost everyone else. Unattractively out of breath and sweaty in an unattractive big T-shirt and shorts. Running was all about pointing out how out of shape I was, particularly compared to (as it felt) almost everyone else.

Oh yes, and running was always about the aching feet, which I thought was just a natural part of running for everyone. And then I got some real running shoes, from a store that actually analyzes your feet, the shoes’ fit, and your stride. As a lifelong low-maintenance girl, the running-shoe fit is the closest thing I’ve come to an in-store makeover, for now. (What’s next: Sephora?)

I didn’t even want to run. Walking has always been more, ahem, my speed. However, having come through a difficult year with my mind mostly intact, it was time to take better care of the body. A couple of people very close to me have had great success with this program, so I thought I would give it a try.

Now, running by myself meant that I didn’t have to worry about anyone timing me, or about competing with anyone else, or thinking about how quickly I lose my breath. So for the first two weeks or so, I walked most of the time, and listened to music, and walked a little faster for a minute or two, here and there. But I didn’t think that it counted as running. Then, ventolin inhaler nyc during the “run” portions of the program, I began to shuffle, faster than walking and almost to a fast race walk. I didn’t think that was running, either.

Maybe it wasn’t. I now realize that in running, there’s something important about the hands.

As I walked for the first few weeks, I’d kept my hands open, loose, mostly so I could move them along with the music coming from my Itouch. I played air piano for Stevie Wonder, or waved my hands around as I sang with ABBA, and even played air typewriter for the Prince lyrics. But the hands have always been loose: fingers open, keeping their options open. I’m not running, no sirree. Who’s running around here? Not me, not me. La, la, la.

But last week I began to close my hands into loose fists, thumbs inexplicably tucked under index fingers. And I realized what making a fist does to the arms: it activates the muscles in the forearms. Once the forearms commit, they activate the elbows. When the elbows swing forward, in counterpoint with your feet, they bring their own momentum. When your elbows and arms are swinging, your entire upper body commits to the run. Since your lower body’s pretty much moving already when you run, simply clenching your fists involves your entire body in the run. The grip isn’t violent. Your fists just have to be clenched, fingers closed enough for a fist-bump. Those of you reading this who are runners, you must know this already. But it’s huge news to me.

You have to clench your fists first: then the commitment will come.

I’m here, after a couple of crazy weeks. I’ve been worried about writing, worried about grading, worried about teaching, but mostly worried about showing up in the first place. I still don’t think I’m a runner. And yet, I suspect that I’ll be learning from what it is to run, for a long time.

Thanks for coming back and reading.

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An interlude

My mom’s visiting this week, and she brought more papers and objects from the archive, also known as her garage. And though I haven’t even finished writing about my dad’s manuscript, I’ve got a whole new set of documents to feed the book project. A letter from his chess-playing friend, along with a sheaf of computer chess score sheets. My dad’s old 5-year diary, from the early-to-mid 1950s. The diary itself will take a while: each whole day compressed into about an inch of space. Each page has five years of the same day. In some ways it reminds me of a Twitter feed, a Facebook status update. Perhaps the technology of documenting our days isn’t so different.

There are difficult documents in this batch: a copy of my dad’s death certificate, which means that I can now request his military records. A copy of the first and last Father’s Day poem that I wrote for my dad; he died in June. Hard. And harder still: the poem’s folded inside a copy of the eulogy that my uncle delivered at the funeral. A small gift from the eulogy: according to my uncle, my dad was conscious enough to read my poem before he died.

These are papers that I haven’t seen in years, if at all.

I’ve been thinking about my family archives: all those garages, all those places where we’ve kept paper traces of our lives. I’ve got my own archive growing a life of its own in my basement. “Nimuras,” my grandfather once mused, with some disgust, “are notorious pack rats.” What if we took that pack-rat tendency into historical ventolin inhaler usa context, with the Depression, with the dispossession of internment? (And, yes: am I just excusing our love for clutter?) I wonder how long it takes my family to go back through those boxes, if at all.

In fact, a couple of nights ago, I woke up wondering about my own pack-rat tendency to keep everything, but rarely look back at it all. Why has it taken me so long to begin this book project, to go back through the family archive? The metaphor may be too obvious: put everything into a box, and imagine that the keeping will be enough. But as most historians and librarians would probably tell you, an archive’s almost no good until somebody processes it, makes sense of it, organizes it. The literary critic in me would add: and makes it into narrative.

Can memory work the same way as archives? Can you bury memories desperately, leave them untouched for years, and return to them intact? And if not, is this one reason why we need physical archives?

What draws me back to this archive, this set of memories about my dad, is something I can only describe as an insistent tug. I don’t think that nostalgia is drawing me back, if nostalgia means the desire to look back, relive, find pleasure in the bittersweetness of the loss.

It’s more like the reason you might press a bruise. Yes, that’s still there. Yes, it still hurts. But maybe your fingers want to return to that mark, precisely because it’s a visible sign that you have hit something hard and survived. You press it, and wonder if it’s healed yet.

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Desert chrysanthemums

Thus far, one of the best things that my dad’s book has given me is my grandfather.

Although there are pictures of me with my dad’s mother, I never got to meet my grandfather; he died before I was born. And my maternal grandfather actually died the year I was born, a few months before my birth in December. So I never had a biological grandfather, growing up.

But my grandfather, my dad’s father, is all over the manuscript.

He was a dancer. There’s an entire chapter devoted to a folk dance that my grandfather used to perform, and even performed in camp, a fisherman’s dance. As a granddaughter, it’s lovely to know that he was a dancer; as an editor, I am not sure why the chapter is there. But that’s a conversation I’ll have with the manuscript another time.

He was a rabble-rouser, a speech-maker. Contrary to what I used to think about our family history, my dad and his siblings were not sent to Tule Lake initially because of my grandfather’s “troublemaker” behavior. While at Tule Lake, my grandfather made a series of fiery speeches against the military recruitment policies in camp. For that series of speeches, he was taken away to New Mexico. I say this with pride.

He cared about his community. Upon his return from New Mexico, when asked what he would like to do, he answered, “I would like to serve the people of this camp.”

He was a man with a sense of history. When he learned that World War II had ended, he sighed, and said “From this day on, I will become an American Indian.” How did he know what it was to be an American Indian, to associate his own experience of dispossession with theirs?

In other words, the manuscript is shot through with a young boy’s hero-worship of his father. (I realize that’s something I’ll need to think about for my own book.) It makes a certain amount of sense: my dad was writing about the time from when he was 10 to when he was 14. Not long after that, I believe, he was no longer living at home, working in various jobs. (I’ll have to find out more about this gap.) For all I know at this moment, actually, my father was writing about and through the loss of his own father.

In my dad’s buy ventolin with no prescription manuscript, the loss is so palpable that even after my grandfather returns to camp from imprisonment in New Mexico, my dad thinks hard about what his father’s absence meant. “What is a family without a father?” he asks himself.

My father’s response to his own question stuns me: “Not much of anything.”

And here I can begin to write back to my father. After age 10, I grew up without a father. And while we missed him terribly—what he said about a father’s absence? It’s just not true. Or at least, it’s not true for everyone. It wasn’t true for us, for my sister and my mother and I, and our larger extended family (who never abandoned us, even though their brother had died). For my sister and me, the youngest of our generation of 13 cousins, it has been a family existence rich with love.

Before opening the manuscript envelope, there were so many questions that I wanted answered. I think that I went to the manuscript not just to find my father, but to find fathering: to find advice, support, strength. How does one endure terrible, difficult times?

And I have to confess that in this respect, the manuscript feels incomplete. Why? My friend B put it best, I think. I told her that I’d looked for a father in the manuscript, but didn’t find him, and she nodded with understanding. “You went to find your father—but what you found was another kid.”

So it’s unexpected and wondrous, painful and lovely, that while the fathering I wanted wasn’t in my dad’s book, the grandfathering was. “You must have the capacities to bounce back,” he said to my father, “no matter what the adversities are.”

I like to think that my grandfather learned that lesson from the gardens that they grew in camp. I didn’t know that families could grow anything in Tule Lake. But my father describes growing flowers and vegetables in his manuscript. “The flowers brightened the area,” my father says, “and the sense of desolation was removed.” Few people can talk about the power of endurance and regeneration like farmers can.

You see, all this time I thought that I love chrysanthemums because my father loved them. I didn’t know he inherited this love from my grandfather.

They grew chrysanthemums in camp, too.

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So you want to be a writer

As of this writing, Google generates over 81 million suggestions just for this phrase alone. I should take this as an inspiring sign that so many people want to write, or that so many people want to know how to write. Or, if I was so inclined, I could take this as a depressing sign that so many people have written about this topic already.

But, a happy person by nature, I’m not so inclined. Here’s a collection of links that have been on my mind lately when it comes to writing and the writing life. Since I’ve gone back to teaching last month, and started one daughter in kindergarten, I need to get back into a regular routine of creative writing, somehow. To clear my mind (and my bookmarks menu), I decided to start here.

In the literature/music class I’m teaching this semester, we’ve been talking about making mixes of songs. Here’s my mix of links and quotations that are running through my head, called “So you want to be a writer.” (Liner notes included: one of my favorite genres of writing, one that my students tell me is being lost with the IPod/MP3 playlist.)

Track 1: Dear Sugar, “Write Like A Motherf*cker” (Sorry, Mom.)
Dear Sugar (an advice columnist at The Rumpus) usually manages to make me cry, or gasp, or laugh, or all three. “I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to.” This column is the starting gun for the album.

Track 2: Voices of Our Nation, Summer Writing Workshop for Writers of Color
Application guidelines for the VONA workshop. I’d never heard of this workshop before, but it sounds like a wonderful experience, set in one of my favorite cities in the world. It looks like something I could apply for, eventually: an abbreviated, near-private version of an MFA, in a supportive community.

Track 3: Michelle Hoover, “So You Want To Be A Writer?”
Michelle Hoover’s “so you want to be a writer” roundup of links and advice, recommended via Twitter by Poets and Writers magazine. Some useful, practical advice for writers here and now.

Track 4: Renee Shea, “The Taste of Memory: A Profile of Monique Truong”
Continuing the Poets and Writers track, Renee Shea’s recent profile is a wonderful read. One interesting piece here is not only Truong’s impressive track record of awards, but also her methodical, disciplined approach to applying for awards in the first place. “As writers we are socialized into a state of perpetual gratefulness-to receive a grant, a publishing contract, a book tour- as if we didn’t earn anything with our labor and talents. Lawyers don’t think that way. They know that they have a valuable skill and expect valuable compensation for it. I love my fellow writers, but I wish that they would think and behave –just in this instance-more like lawyers.”

Track 5: Alexander Chee, “Getting Your Name Out There”
Alexander Chee’s series on author blogging. Chee is a gracious and generous Twitterquaintance, and I actually began to read his writing there. (And I just checked out his first novel from the library.) But his blog, Koreanish, contains helpful, thoughtful posts on the writing life.

Track 6: Junot Díaz, “How I Became A Writer“
I started reading about this story from Chee’s blog, but went to read the full story from O Magazine. I am simultaneously inspired and terrified by the heartbreak behind the writing of Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. One of my favorite novels, of all time—but, like so many amazing things in this life, it did not come for free.

Track 7: Jennifer Kahn, “The Art of the Perfect Pitch”
And speaking of free (and the need for money), here is some practical freelance writing advice from UC Berkeley School of Journalism professor Jennifer Kahn about how to sell a potential story to an editor.

Track 8: Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

I don’t have a link, but a quotation instead. I’ve been mulling over the question of audience for the book I’m writing, ever since early last week.
“If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this.”

Track 9: J.K. Rowling, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination.”
J.K. Rowling’s 2008 commencement address at Harvard, her version of the famous Yoda mantra: “Do or do not do. There is no try.” Like Lamott’s advice above, some instructions on writing and life.

“And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”