New Introduction

This new blog was supposed to host an archive of old writings: from Europe, from China, the various news articles and internet videos I found appealing, intellectually stimulating or infuriating from a feminist perspective, etc. However, an irrevocable error occurred: after I thought I copied and pasted former posts successfully (posts I foolishly did not back up before deleting), I discovered that nothing showed up on this web page except a list of titles (titles which will remain here as micro-mementos). What I wrote about my Yunnan experience is the only thing salvaged.

I have let it go: rebelling against loss. When I was moving, I was disgusted by my attachment to useless, material stuff. It is quite a different compulsion to cling to something that takes up virtual space—writings that still inhabit the mysterious depths of the internet, beyond my access. Somewhere in the folds of my mind these written recollections stick, but they are scrambled distortions when forced to the surface of my consciousness.

Before I lost all of the blogging I did, I had read through it and was surprised at what I nearly forgot. When I was younger, I was proud of my memory, claiming that I recalled some fuzzy moments of my second birthday. Once a psychology student told me that my claims were bogus. We can’t recollect things from such early ages: what we think we remember is constructed from looking at old photographs or hearing stories from our family. Journaling is a way to rebel against the claims of a collective memory—a compromised memory formed by a group, permitting a single perspective to be the “true” one. Which isn’t to say that family stories or memories are not fluid; variation persists.

Lately I have been struck by the nebulous quality of my memories. When I traveled, I kept notes about what things were experienced on each day of the journey because I knew that later, without these notes, I would confuse chronology and forget small details—names, colors, foreign vocabulary . . . The more eventful my life becomes, the more cluttered my mind feels—the more eager I am to disregard sensory details and the emotions connected to past occurrences.

My grandma recently gave me her “personal history” to edit for her. Prior to this assignment, I read the autobiographical writings of my grandfather—recollections primarily of his childhood on his family’s ranch in New Mexico before the Depression. As I read these things, things of little interest to people who have no personal or familial tie to my grandparents (as my grandfather’s apologia states in the beginning of his text), I wondered about my grandparents forgotten memories. The entirety of our lives, counting every lived second to the present, expands away from us like a string of stars expanding into the ever-growing universe. What survives of the narrative of my grandparents’ lives is the evidence of how they prioritized their memories. I judge that civility was the crutch of my grandparents long marriage, and as I read their separate narratives, civility dominated. Their writing strikes me as polite and hesitant to investigate any hurt, shame, scandal, or anger. Tragedy and emotion are not absent from their recollections, but I feel as if they purposely concealed a lot of information. Perhaps they deemed these things irrelevant long ago, and all that they truly recall takes up twenty to eighty pages of 12 pt Courier type. Should I be afraid or comforted by the idea that when I am eighty years old my entire life to date could take up no more than twenty pages?

There is so much I could say in response to the contrast in my grandparents’ writing—in terms of style and content. My grandfather recalls the most minute of details. As a former highway engineer, he exhibited brilliance in retaining the technical details of any process: from watching how roads were built when he was a boy, to herding and milking cattle, to building a pig pen in shop class--including all of the dimensions and measurements involved in any of these tasks. The highlight of my grandmother’s life was certainly her life after marriage, and she describes the courtship, marriage, and honeymoon to my grandfather in greater detail than he allows in his writing.

How did the Panama Canal first strike my grandfather when he went there, during World War II, denied from joining more direct military efforts as a pilot, because his engineering commission in Central America was seen as helping the war efforts? How did he feel as a new father, holding a baby by his first wife, before my grandmother, a daughter estranged from the family that I know and love? What ran through my grandmother’s head as she delivered her first child, when she carried my mother and uncles and aunts inside her body? When she had her nervous breakdown during high school? Their memories feel stale, not freshly bursting with three hundred and sixty degrees of sensory perception.

Since I moved to Harlem (or, more specifically, Hamilton Heights) nearly ten days ago, I already feel the fullness of my experience narrowing, blurring. It feels like I have been here for a weekend, or, contradictorily, that I never left from my visit in the spring, although there was a whole interval where I returned to China, traveled to Vancouver, and rested in Denver before this new, semi-permanent move. I plan to write as much as I can, as an aid to my memory—or simply to tune out the sound of the vibrating beats of Latino hip hop as beer bottle caps are thrown at my window.