How to Grow Trees

On May 18, 1980, 8:32 AM, an earthquake on Mount Saint Helens’ north slope caused the volcano to violently erupt, flattening the surrounding forest and spewing pyroclastic debris across the state. My father’s parents were living in Selah, near Yakima, Washington, when the eruption blanketed the land in sand and ash. My grandfather Merle remembers listening to the radio after church (Merle and his wife Dorothy have been attending 8 o’clock church for decades–they got the news around 8:45, in the garden courtyard, which, by the time I could remember anything of it, had been covered and fittingly renamed the Garden Room), driving home as ash began to fall (and the inability of windshield wipers to clear away volcanic ash), and the darkness of the bright spring day turned night. “The next morning it looked like a moonscape,” Merle said. “You can still see it along the roadway, if you know where to look.”
On May 18, 1995, 8:27 PM, I was born to Kay and Derek Smith at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital. My parents had been married for almost 6 years, a period through which they struggled with tragedy and infertility. They don’t talk about it much. I know they almost had a son named Cooper, and they were considering adoption. But their luck changed, and they had me. My mother says I was a miracle baby. When I was 2, my sister Karly was born. At around 4am on June 24, 1997, I toddled into my parents’ bedroom, looking for food or attention or whatever it is a 2 year old suddenly needs at 4 in the morning. My mom settled me down, and on returning to her bed noticed a large pool of blood where she had been lying–generally not a good sign. Derek got me clothed, sat me in the car, called his parents, and drove me and Kay to the hospital, which we happened to live about 2 minutes away from, and my sister was delivered via cesarean. My dad remembers seeing (and does a good impression of) Karly’s tiny arms raised to her tiny scrunched-up face as doctors held her above the operating table. Things might have gone worse if I hadn’t woken up my mom–as it was, Karly had to spend months under glass, in an incubator, in a neonatal intensive care unit, until she was strong enough to leave the hospital. My earliest visual memory is in that house by the hospital (although the lot where it stood is now just a half-acre of grass) sitting on my mom’s lap in a chair in the living room, my dad bringing Karly over so she could breastfeed, me staring back from my dad’s arms and feeling pretty indignant about the whole switch.
My sister and I both have memories of dreams where Derek lost his head. In my sister’s dream, Dad came into her room with a rose in his mouth, his head toppling off and landing on the floor in front of her, rose and all. In mine, Dad dropped me off at my elementary school for a choir event, and when I came back out, sipping on silver-colored juice, his head had shrunk down to a nub, and I worried about his brain, but we could still play checkers. Talking with my dad revealed he had worn a moustache up until a certain point in our childhood. Maybe its shaving kept us from recognizing his “new head”, and so we dreamed about the old one falling off and shrinking away. Maybe our childhood memories are so far away from us that when we look back, we mix them with dreams, or can only recognize them as dreams–or maybe we remember as we experienced the world as children, in surreal dreamy strokes where Dad’s head comes off along with his moustache.
In growing up and leaving home, I’ve begun to experience the phenomenon where my parents appear less and less as the omnipresent guardian denizens of Mom and Dad, but as Kay and Derek, as people, with identities and memories and fears and triumphs, who have lived through life at my age and whose situation I might one day be in. Additionally, as time continues to drag on, the older generations of my family become smaller and smaller, and I realize that family isn’t a permanent fixture, but a structure of relationships that constantly changes as people are born, die, and move about in between. Winter quarter this year (my freshman year) I got to know and interviewed my partner’s grandmother, and used her testimony to create a life history portrait, which made me eager to turn the lens on my own family. When my grandfather Bob passed away in 2011, I learned more about him after he died than I ever did when he was alive, so this project is a way of preserving my grandparents’ legacy and family memory when I can still hear it from their mouths. It’s a way for me to understand my position in my family, which I feel the most connected to after moving out. It’s time to go back home for a while.
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Networked buses ferry me over desert, mountains, wetlands, 200 miles from the Evergreen State College, to the east, where the verdancy of the Sound recedes and greybrown foothills fold into the waste. I was born in the Valley and again the Valley I return, to creaky hardwood floors where I slid and stomped my feet, to 100-yr-old concrete pavers and innumerable taquerias. Home is the darkness and silence of a basement bedroom and the passive animosity of territorial cats.
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To conduct research, I used a weekend to take a visit to Yakima. It’s a long way by bus–6 hours in total from Olympia to Tacoma to Seattle to Yakima–but I enjoy travel.
At home it seems like things have changed very little, for now, at least–I learned my sister will attend the University of Washington fall 2015, and soon there will be no one left save parents and cats. I watched my dad mow the lawn while my kitty cowered on my lap. My family went out for burgers at a local chain (our traditional christmastime candy cane shake location, although we missed the trip this last December) and drove around town. My mom pointed out the house she had lived in while single–a pueblo-ish duplex–and was unable to locate my dad’s first apartment.
The next day I planned 3 interview sessions with my grandparents and my parents. I wanted to know more about the places they lived, the people they knew, their experiences with their parents and siblings, and their experiences as parents with their children.
My first session was with my grandmother Joanna. Grandma Jo is my mom’s mom, a sweet, graceful lady with silver hair, a wardrobe of great cardigans, a rollicking sense of humor, and an intense dislike of cats, especially on her lap. She has a little place several blocks from our house, but she’s been living with our family for the last 4 years following the death of her husband Bob. She volunteers at the Yakima Union Gospel Mission along with my dad’s parents, serving unhoused people in the community. She does not drive, but regularly walks over to maintain her condo. My grandparents used to stay there a few times a year–during holidays we’d have Swedish dinner with homemade potato sausages; during summer my sister, Grandma Jo and me (and on very rare occasions my grandfather) would have tea parties and play hide-and-go-seek. She was initially hesitant about her ability to remember, but she recalled her life with significant and vivid details intact. I think when people get older they’re expected to lose mental faculty but my grandmother is sharp yet.
Joanna didn’t readily talk much about her childhood, though. I gather it wasn’t very easy. She was born in Jackson, Wyoming. Her mother was chronically ill, and so Joanna was left to take care of her younger sister (the strength of their bond is visible whenever Joanna visits Kathy in Bellevue). Her father worked as a wrangler at a dude ranch, in a hardware store, and as an undertaker, but his dream was to become a pastor, which, as Joanna told me, was a journey that took him and his family around the western United States. He got his start broadcasting Fuller Seminary programs over the radio from California.
They had a radio and they would bring the radio from home, he had a little church that they could go to, and they’d set the radio up on the pulpit, and the program would come through and the people would listen and they would have church that way for a while. And then Dad got to the point where he was preaching himself. Then we moved to Idaho Falls, Idaho, from Jackson, and Dad had the Covenant Church there, and we stayed there for a good number of years, and he decided he wanted to become part of the Covenant pastors and so then he had to go on and go to school, they wanted him to have more schooling, so he moved to Missoula, Montana, and he went to university there for a couple of years, I think it was, and then after Missoula we moved to Bremerton, and by that time there were 3 kids of us, when we moved to Bremerton, and he started a church there.

Joanna spent most of her school years in Bremerton. A year ago last spring, my parents took her over–she wanted to donate her old girl scout uniform to the museum and see what had come of their house and the church her father had built.
We found where the church was, but it was nothing what I remember as a church building. I remember it as being quite a large–well, fairly good-sized church, and having a steeple, and it had a basement, and another floor for the church part, and pews and all. In fact I was confirmed there, but when we came back the house was gone, and had been gone for some time, you could tell that. The church was different.

My grandmother hopes she can visit Bremerton again to learn the fate of the church.
Joanna’s family moved again to California, where she finished high school. She met Bob there, when she was 20, in a car on a trip to a camp. I wish my grandfather was still around so I could learn more about his past, but I do know he was the son of Swedish immigrants, and a precocious kid. He had enlisted in the Navy and served with the Seabees (a military construction unit) and planned to attend Colorado State University on his GI bill. Bob and Joanna hit it off, evidently, and got married about 5 months later–bear in mind that this was the 1950s, but my grandmother was eager and happy to have a family and to be a mother, so they piled up Bob’s miniscule Nash Metropolitan convertible with belongings and wedding gifts and took off across the country to Fort Collins, Colorado.
That was kind of hard, to move away from home, from what I knew as home, for me, for a while, and particularly to go away, just brand new, newly married, not really knowing each other that well, either, with only having months that we’d gone together as a couple. But it worked out alright…You just love each other and help each other along.

Their first child was born two years later–a boy named Karl. (My uncle Karl now lives in Vancouver, WA, with his wife June and their son Kyle. Karl gave me a Weird Al mix CD which I credit as my introduction to popular music. My mom used to tell me about her brother blasting Pink Floyd through their house speaker system, which Bob had wired himself. Bob did a lot of things himself. He assembled the first color TV on their block. He earned his Ph.D. when he was 50.) Bob worked at a nursery during his school years, and Joanna worked at a hospital as a receptionist up until her baby was born (and delivered right next to where she had worked checking in patients). They lived in the basement apartment of a quonset hut with water pipes right above their heads, neighboring a policeman, who helped right the tiny Nash Metropolitan after goonish college students had turned it on its side one Halloween.
After graduating at the top of his class, Bob starting working for the US Forest Service as a research scientist, and moved down to Albuquerque, New Mexico, when Karl was 3. My mother was born in Albuquerque, but has no memory of it–they moved back to Fort Collins when she was 6 months old, and stayed there until she was 8. Bob got a job offer from the Canadian Forest Service, so he switched allegiances and they moved up to Calgary, Alberta. They spent a couple of years there, and then moved again up to Edmonton, Alberta. Bob enjoyed city life. He walked or took public transit whenever he could and had his family do the same. According to my mom it was “a bit bizarre. Maybe he was ahead of his time.”
Bob was ahead of his time. He was concerned about his ecological footprint. He was necessarily involved with technology–his job put him on the cutting-edge. He also seriously loved gizmos. He had a Palm Pilot.
Bob’s work meant he had to spend a lot of time in the forest, naturally, and he brought his family to camp or stay in cabins while he worked, in the American Rockies in Colorado, and in Kananaskis and the Canadian Rockies in Alberta. When my mom was 13, he had the opportunity to do research in New Zealand, so the family uprooted and moved over. They spent a year and a half there, exploring, hiking, studying trees, visiting Australia. Joanna described sort of a tree incubator Bob could use to simulate and control climate to compare hypothetical growth rates around the world, to learn how to help trees grow quickly and healthy in Canada.
Joanna and her family moved back to Edmonton where they stayed until the kids moved out and Bob retired–Karl was the first to go. He went to school in Calgary and received training in helicopters, and met the woman who became his wife. “It was June,” said Joanna, “who had come from a different province, other there, to Edmonton, and she took him away. He fell in love with her, and that really disturbed your mother… She said she missed him a great deal.” I asked my mom about her relationship with her brother and she told me they’d always been best friends: “I think part of that is having moved and lived in different countries and nobody else really having the same experience that you have, or having the same parents that you have, or any of that.” Karl got married, and quit flying helicopters after a crash. Kay left to go to school soon after. She attended Seattle Pacific University–Bob drove her all the way down from Edmonton because Joanna was starting work at a preschool. My mom wanted to go to a school far away from home, which makes sense, after a childhood spent around the globe–she didn’t really settle down until she met my father, who’s lived in the same place just about his entire life.
Joanna and Bob didn’t ever really stop moving around, either. Bob retired and they moved to Canmore, Alberta, a little mining settlement turned ski resort (which experienced a surge in growth after hosting several events in the 1988 Winter Olympics–Bob was consulted regarding snowfall on at least one of the slopes). Around 2008, they sold their home in Canmore and moved to Creston, British Columbia, to be closer to Kay and Karl and their families. Creston is barely across the border but distinctly Canadian–ketchup chips and Québécois migrant workers in Tim Hortons Canadian. Bob spent these years battling with cancer, but by early 2011 the end was in sight. Kay was with him for his last weeks, talking, driving, listening, and she was with him when he passed. I remember going up later in the year to his funeral at a tiny church in Creston where he’d managed to touch the lives of most of the congregation and seeing all these slides and photographs of his youth and their family that’d I’ve never seen–never even thought about looking for–and learning all these things–that he had received a Ph.D., that he had been born in California–that I had never known when he was alive. It was a tragedy. It was the first major family loss for me–too young to remember great-grandparents. My mom had the big task of managing what Bob had had, selling the house in Creston, leveraging accounts so Joanna would have control, and moving her down to live with us, where she’s been since. I love living with my grandma. It makes our family a little less nuclear and a little more multigenerational.
I first remember the toys at Joanna and Bob’s house in Canmore–which might’ve once belonged to Kay or Karl–particularly a little toy tea-bag that stained brown in hot water. I also remember my grandpa’s toys, his office and computer room, stuffed with books and gadgets, where on occasion I’d be allowed to play online games. Their home was a neat little condo in a retirement community, which was innocuous enough–although the bear-proofing on the dumpsters might perturb the uninitiated. It’s hard to keep bears away when you’re sharing mountain territory. This last summer, Joanna furnished a trip up to Canada, through Creston, Cranbrook, into the Canadian Rockies to Banff, Canmore, and up across the plains to the city of Edmonton. In Canmore we encountered taped-off trails and signs warning of a dangerous bear in the vicinity, and we had a good laugh about it. We also encountered a lot of tourists, which surprised my sister and me. As kids, Mom would drive us up to Canada to visit our grandparents most summers. We remembered Canmore as this tiny podunk ski resort mountain village and instead found a rather trendy ski resort mountain village. It’s hard to tell if this was a recent change or the limited memory (or bizarre awareness) of childhood–after all, we visited at the height of tourist season–but at Lake Louise, my mom did note how absolutely packed it was, compared to the last few times we’d been, when the pristine turquoise-teal glacial lake was practically vacant (or at least, our photographs were). The vacation was quite literally a trip down memory lane. We drove through the suburbs of Edmonton, past the house where my mother spent her teenage years. We stopped at the government building where Bob worked and the church where Joanna worked. It was like saying goodbye.
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the trees are ancient, gnarled hands
choked over with wildflowers.
hornets make their home in my father’s first car.
here is a tired-out truck graveyard.
the wheel wells have rusted over.

hornets make their home in my father’s first car.
my father’s father’s father lived in this house,
tumbled down, eye-sockets punched in.
the wheel wells have rusted over.
cherry juice leaves heart stains.
–from orchard song, by Karly Smith
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When I was in high school, in the summers, I’d work for my granddad Merle, sometimes with my cousins, lending a hand where it was needed on the family orchard, and it was needed just about everywhere. He grew cherries, a few trees of peaches, plums, pears, nectarines, and a couple rows of asparagus–but mostly cherries. On my first day, Merle took me out to the bird trap. The thing is: birds eat fruit. To make a living farming cherries, you have to deal with birds. You can cover your trees with nets and keep the birds from getting to the fruit, but that’s a big investment which requires a lot of labor (more than a few grandsons can provide) and a high crop yield in return, and Merle’s operation was too small for that to be feasible. You can use chemical repellant, but my granddad was proud to keep his orchard 100% organic, and although we made repellant from mint mineral oil and garlic powder, effectiveness is limited. He had a propane cannon to scare birds off with periodic noise, but still relied on the bird trap, which is just what it sounds like: a baited cage that birds could get into but struggled to get out of. I remember riding passenger on Merle’s trusty 4-wheeler in violation of clearly visible safety stickers (which went by-and-large ignored) across the orchard through rows of cherry trees to a hillside vista, where the trap was. My granddad entered the cage and proceeded to club starlings. He filled up a bucket with 30 or so. I can’t remember the exact figure. One of them was still twitching as I helped him bury the pail of birds, and I learned some alternate uses of a shovel. Merle must’ve realized he was coming a little strong because we never went back to the bird trap. There was plenty else to do around the property–weeds to be removed, buds to be grafted onto new trees, cherries to be picked, hauled, and dumped in big bins for the warehouse, things to be picked up and taken somewhere else, trash to haul, lawns to mow, jugs to wash, stumps to grind, fences to paint…
By now, the orchard has grown old. Most of the original trees–planted by Merle’s father–are bearing fruit that is smaller and less sweet every year, and as my grandfather ages alongside it, he probably shouldn’t worry about running the whole farm by himself anymore. It’ll be sold soon, maybe to Joanna’s sister, my great-aunt Kathy, and her husband–last I heard they were going to tear up the trees to plant a vineyard.
When I met with my grandparents, they had just come from a funeral. So it was a little somber. For my second session, I sat them down at the dining room table and interviewed them both. I’d have loved to do proper life histories and have multiple interviews with each of them separately, but I didn’t have the time, and I think they were glad to get it over a little quicker this way. Getting both of them together proved valuable, too, as they retreaded family histories together.
My grandad Merle was born in Paola, Kansas.
Merle: My family’s a farm family, nearly all the aunts and uncle I have–Mom and Dad each had 6 brothers and sisters, and most of them were in the farm deal. My earliest memories of doing stuff with family was always hunting and fishing and stuff, starting at a very young age. I probably started in the cradle… Dad was plenty strict, but not really hard strict, he loved his family a lot. Mother was a good quote ‘psychologist’ about raising kids. She was smarter than the kids were. She got them to do what she wanted to do, but it wasn’t by force at all.

He had a brother and a sister. His family moved out to Washington for a year and a half, and on the way back out to Kansas he witnessed an accident–I’d been told the story while we were working together on the orchard, so I asked him to recall:
Merle: Course, the roads weren’t as good, and we were coming around Lake Coeur D’Alene, and a bunch of motorcyclists past us, and then we caught up with them on the curves, because one of the motorcyclists had hit gravel or something in the road, sand, and lost control, and he–his woman passenger, wife, I think, wasn’t hurt, but he got skinned up pretty good, lots of blood on the road. That was my deciding issue, I probably didn’t want to use a motorcycle after that, which I never did.

His family lived in Kansas City, Kansas. His father worked as a welder during WWII. When Merle was 16, they moved permanently out to Selah and began farming in earnest. It was a “great big adventure” for Merle, who loved living, hunting, and fishing in the shadow of mountains (the peaks of Mount Adams and Mount Rainier poking up through the foothills of Eastern Washington would seem extra mountainous coming from flat Kansas). He wasn’t eager to move far away right after high school–he’d only been in the state for 2 years before graduating–so he attended Washington State University, in Pullman, and studied biology and wildlife management, earning a degree in zoology. In the summers he’d go back to Selah and work on the orchard. He met Dorothy on a blind date, and they got married soon after.
Dorothy was born in Columbus, Montana. Her father owned a dry goods store chain in Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Michigan. He was big into hunting and fishing, too, and very detail-oriented, keeping a record of the places he’d been, the fish he’d caught, the game he’d hunted. He died when Dorothy was 10. His father–my great-great-grandfather–helped establish Bethel College, a Mennonite school on the Chisholm cattle trail, in Newton, Kansas, where he also built an opera house. There’s a plaque about him there. Dorothy’s maternal grandfather was an inventor and explorer.
Dorothy: He was the inventor kind of guy, he invented the car coupler for railroad trains coming together, but he never got the patent, and then he built an airship, a dirigible, and took it to the St Louis fair, and on their trial flight–did it hit a guide wire, or something, the wind came up–
Merle: The wind came up.
Dorothy: And blew it over, so it didn’t get to–
Merle: He was the one with the balloon thing.
Dorothy: And then he did discover the chrome mine, near Columbus, where I was born, and that did operate during WWII. In fact there was a great movement of people in town and they really did mine it, built a mill site up there and people lived there, and then after the war they tore it down.
Merle: Well, chromium was really a important part in steelmaking during the war, but the chrome we were getting came out of Africa, I believe it was, and they couldn’t get it because the submarine activity was so strong, from Germany, so very fortunate that he found this mine, because they needed chrome here in the United States. At that time, it was the only chrome mine–basically still is.

Dorothy’s mother wanted her to attend an all-female school, so she attended Monticello College in Godfrey, Illinois, and after one year, she decided she’d rather go to a co-ed college. Her mother agreed, and so she went to WSU. She was one year ahead of Merle when they got married, and after graduating with a degree in art she spent a year working at the graduate school there while Merle finished up. He went in to the Air Force, which took the couple back to Kansas, near Merle’s family.
Dorothy: Sheri, your aunt Sheri was born there. She was an Air Force baby. She cost 5 dollars, and that was just for my food. Then we came out here and aunt Robin was born soon after we got out here, and then a couple years later, then your dad was born.

They lived in a trailer home on the parents’ property while Merle tried to get a job with the National Park Service, but he never found an opening. They had decided their family wouldn’t move around, since Merle remembered the loneliness of entering high school at 16 in a different state. So they started farming on their own. I have memories of the house where my dad grew up in Selah–old books, bas-relief plates on the wall, cable TV, spidery basement, Red Rose tea, although all those things are in the house they’re in now–so I asked him about it:
Derek: We were on the edge of town, town being fairly small to start with, but our house was right on the city limits, and there were houses around us, but there wasn’t a lot of activity, there was still a fair bit of farmland or fields, about a quarter of a mile away from the junior high school, so when I went to school I could walk there. In fact, I remember the day when one of my teachers caught me standing at the bus stop and he asked me where I lived, and I pointed to the house–you could see it from the school–he asked me, why are you riding the bus? So I thought, why am I? So I started walking after that. It was nice, it was fairly quiet, excitement being sometimes the neighbors cows would get out and get into our yard, things like that. My grandparents had their orchard, so part of growing up would be spending a great deal of time over at their place, just a couple miles away.

Merle had a job as a fruit and vegetable inspector for the state, but since 1971, he’s been on his own, working for himself. Dorothy started working again when Derek was in high school, when their family was struggling financially, and she worked 21 years as a secretary for First Presbyterian Church in Yakima. One pastor who’d moved to a church in Texas sent his new secretary up to train with her–she’s essentially a secretary sensei.
Merle: We didn’t have a boat, we built a boat, to go salmon fishing in, didn’t have a motorhome, so we made them out of school buses or whatever we could do, so if we didn’t have a way to do something, we just usually made it ourselves. That’s always been the modus operandi.

Most of their extended family lived right around them, so family events made up a big part of their social life, and they’d take trips to visit geographically distant relatives on holidays. While en route with grandparents and cousins to Kansas one year, their retrofitted bookmobile caught fire near Boise, Idaho. They had pulled over and all piled out of the bookmobile when a state patrolman came up and told them brusquely to get back in the vehicle and start driving. They’d managed to douse the flames and get going so as to avoid loitering on the side of the road while President Carter’s motorcade passed the other way.
Derek, like most of his family, attended WSU. (When I was a junior in high school and thinking about what college to go to, I told Dorothy I was considering Central Washington University, and got the full list of relatives who’d gone to WSU. I didn’t even know Evergreen existed then.) He graduated with a degree in drama, and moved back to Selah, and eventually got an apartment in Yakima. My dad currently works as a graphic designer. He worked for a few companies in town, but permanent employment opportunities have been hard to come by in recent years, so most of his work is freelance. He designs for his buddies and for our church. Like his father, he enjoys working for himself doing what he loves.
My mom moved to the Yakima Valley to teach elementary school in Toppenish (now she works for the Selah school district as a literacy coach, teaching teachers), and she moved to Yakima in search of a larger community than tiny Toppenish. I grilled my parents for my third and final interview and managed to squeeze out the story of their union. Neither of them had had much luck in finding partners–at 29, Derek had given up on looking and decided to wait and see, and shortly thereafter fell victim to the plot of a mutual friend, who set my parents up. Kay and this friend had gone on a spring break road trip to Napa Valley, California–they’d both suffered from heartache and decided to do something about it.
Kay: We wanted to be in a different spot a year from there, so then we just talked about what would be proactive steps in making that happen, and that was widening our circle of people that we knew, particularly men that would be marriage material.

On their first date, Kay and Derek went to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Kay: Which I had seen, like the night before or something, but I didn’t tell him that.
Derek: You didn’t tell me that!

They were married about a year later (and incidentally, so was the mutual friend).

Kay: It was interesting, we had a lot of things in common, our family backgrounds are very similar, it was kind of an easy relationship to have. It wasn’t difficult, I just think we have a lot of things that are a match to each other. We used to joke that we were separated at birth. We even have this little book, I don’t know if I bought it or you bought it, but it’s people separated at birth. We just thought we had so many common experiences that had happened about the same time growing up, and our parents were very similar, same kind of involvement. That all changes once you get married and start living together, and you realize, nope, you don’t have a lot of things in common at all. But it felt that way at the time!

I’d never really thought of my parents having a lot in common, either, besides living together and begetting me, but I can see how they really could’ve hit it off. Kay’s family moved around and Derek’s family made roots, but as a result they were both very close-knit. Their Christian faith and the presence of the church has been central to their lives and the lives of their family. They’re both musicians and theatre-lovers. Kay got to know Derek’s family while sorting cherries for a couple weeks on the orchard (probably pretty well–sorting is such menial labor, you have to keep on talking to avoid losing your mind) and Derek met Kay’s parents on a road trip up to Edmonton.
Then I was born, and my sister was born, and now we’re here, with one kid out of the house and the other about to leave home. It seems like the family I knew in my childhood is poised on the brink of disintegration, but I guess that’s the nature of things. People are born, they leave their homes, they form bonds, they have their own kids, they die–so what is the family? It’s not just a roster of names and dates delineating genealogical hand-down. It’s bigger than 4 seats around the dinner table and more than you could capture in any photograph. Maybe it’s the time spent in a place, or between places, between people who love each other.
When I had run out of questions to ask my parents, my mom turned the interview around on me. She asked me, “How do you think you’ve grown, from last year to this year?” A year ago I was kind of broken. After high school I had no plans. I moved to Tukwila, Washington, with a friend and lived off what I made working at Best Buy. I was so thrilled at first to have my freedom and independence and to support myself, but it was lonely, and after a year and a half I was worn thin. I was going nowhere but deeper into depression, I felt. My relationship with my roommate broke down, and I didn’t have anyone to turn to, except my family, who told me the door was always open if I needed to come back. So I did. I got accepted to Evergreen and left for Yakima soon after. For a while, going home felt like giving in, like the time I’d spent in Tukwila had been wasted, but with the support of my mom, my dad, and my sister, I started to feel better about myself. I worked in a cherry packing warehouse and it was like learning social interaction all over again. I worked on music and started writing my own songs. I found real friends. I came to understand that the time I spent in Tukwila wasn’t wasted, that I could learn from mistakes, and I went off to college feeling better about myself than I ever had. Attending school on my own has had its own set of challenges, but living and working by myself helped prepare me for a lot of them.
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I asked each of my interview participants what was the most challenging thing about being a parent. It was a little surreal asking my own parents about being parents, but I realize their side of the relationship is a perspective that I haven’t really gotten up until now.
Joanna: Oh, the whole thing. *laughs* Particularly when they’re young and you don’t know–they cry, babies cry–and you don’t know what to do next to help them out. One of the things that Karl would do is he would kind of throw up after you would feed him. That would kinda always be, “Oh why? Why does have to do that?”…That probably isn’t a good thing to say.

Merle: Well, finance always seemed like it was an issue.
Dorothy: Yeah, that was the issue.
Merle: I didn’t, couldn’t find work when I first got out of the Air Force. Then, it was kind of tough, had two kids by then.
Dorothy: Well, there weren’t any serious challenges other than just the day by day little things that happen, you know, when kids are growing up, that kind of thing–that we know of!

Derek: Well, each stage has its own challenges, and I think the–probably the overarching challenge is the fact that we’d never done it before. I can still remember the day that they actually allowed–the hospital people actually allowed us to take you out and put you in the carseat and go home with you, and we’re just looking at each other, okay, now what? What do we do?

Kay: Probably always feeling like whatever you’re doing may not be good enough, or in some way is going to mess up this human person that you’ve been given and blessed with… Rarely do I feel in control, like I know what I’m doing. It’s very much unlike the job that I do at school. Most of the time, I feel like I know what I’m doing, or there’s research or there’s people to go to talk to–there’s always the next year’s group to try stuff out on again, there’s a restart button–there isn’t on your kids, they’re always with you.

I also asked them what they found most rewarding about being a parent.

Kay: I think really right now you’re discovering all those things about yourself that I feel like I’ve always seen and known were there, but maybe not quite known how to–I don’t want to shove you into them, or tell you you’re supposed to do this or that, gotta watch you discover them for yourself and grow into them. I think that’s really rewarding.

Derek: Having children certainly makes you less selfish. Your mom and I could’ve just gone on and done whatever we wanted to do as a couple, but in deciding to have a family, it grounds us, too. We get a little bit of an education.

Joanna: Watching them develop and grow, change.

Dorothy: Just everything, I mean, just to have a little person that you could call your own, that you loved.
Merle: Yeah.

.

Tasia Siereveld

5-26-15

In Search of Lost Time

Wing Luke: The Heart of the International District

I’m strolling along in Seattle, but walking beneath the iron and glass pergola hugging the corner of Pioneer Square Park, I can almost imagine that I am strolling through a European metropolis on the cusp of the 20th century. This is something I love about this city; its many faces have a way of transporting you to a different time, and sometimes, a different place. The Beaux Arts of Union Station captures the obsession the West had with Parisian architecture around the turn of the 19th century, the Space Needle takes you back to the post WWII era which marks the love affair so many architects had with everything outer-space, and the Central Waterfront looks out onto Elliott Bay and provides you with all the joys of boardwalk culture. All of these stylistic expressions of Seattle have a special place in my heart, but the district of seattle which I formed a unique affection for is the International District, which greets me as I step out of Pioneer square.

It is difficult for me to clearly explain why I feel such a profound connection to the International District, which prior to the 1970s was still referred to as Chinatown. In truth, I think it is due to a whole host of reasons, some obvious and some hidden even from me. I first visited the area 7th grade with an after-school club for Japanese culture enthusiasts. Initially I joined because of my admiration for the teacher who started the club, but I quickly grew very interested in the subject matter. As the grand conclusion to the group’s time together we took a journey to Seattle’s International District(IND). Our first stop, the place I will always see as the heart of the district, was the Wing Luke Museum.

The Wing Luke Museum is dedicated to preserving the history and culture of Seattle’s Asian Pacific American community. The International District is one of the only communities of it’s kind on the US mainland, a remarkable collection of cultures are woven into it’s history, including not only Japanese and Chinese, but Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, and Indian.  Because of the area’s complex population, there are many complex matters the museum, which is a community based organization, has to consider as they design their exhibits. Because the museum is designed in collaboration with the community, the exhibits it contains say a lot about what the IND community values. Through my exploration of the museum I distinguished two important themes, community and identity. These concepts are integral to the museum’s approach to the representation of the Pacific Asian American community. The museum’s ability to weave an engaging narrative of history and inspire within me a keen interest in the subject matter hinged upon their used of those themes.

My first visit to the Wing Luke Museum for the purpose of this project took place on a Friday. Walking up King St. on my way to the museum i could smell the roast duck that was hanging in the window of the Fortuna Cafe, as well as the heady aroma of dried spices wafting out of a small Chinese grocery. The heavy wooden doors, which formed the entrance to the museum, caused a rush of air to be dragged into the building as they swung open, sending the massive colorful wind chime overhead into a frenzy. I walked up to the reception counter,“Hi, I would like to purchase a year long membership.” I said said cheerfully. The young woman sitting behind the desk smiled at me.

“Sure,” she said “just sign this paperwork here please.” She handed me a clip board with a single form on it. I thanked her and went on to explain my mission there at the museum. The young women looked genuinely pleased. “Well we certainly appreciate your interest.” she said. She told me that she could get me in touch with the director of educational outreach, and that they would make sure I got access to all the resources I would need. She then handed me a small map of the museum and gave me some information on the exhibits and upcoming oral history tour. I noted how warm my welcome was, as opposed to the rather stuffy receptions I have received at some other museums. I relaxed  at the woman’s sign that she was genuinely excited that I had designed a project around the museum. I glanced at the pamphlet for new members. “It’s Your Museum!” it read.

I decided to spend the few minutes I had before the beginning of the oral history tour in one of my favorite exhibits. To reach the exhibit one must climb a set of stairs which on a sunny day seem to ascend into the brightness of the sky. The stairs look to be made of old recycled dock wood, and I can easily imagine them leading out to Puget Sound. At the end of the staircase there is a landing bathed in the sunlight shining through the panel of glass which forms the ceiling. The installation is titled  “The Letter Cloud”, and was designed by Susie Kozawa and Erin Shie Palmer. The walls of the hall look to have been pulled from an old seaside shanty, and are covered in tar and ornamented with frosted windows glowing with candle light. The azure sky shining through the skylight is meant to represent the blue of the ocean. Hundreds of paper letters are suspended overhead by fishing line, and dance in the wake of an artificial breeze.

From the end of the hall came the sound of a gentle voice, but the words were lost in the sound of the waves until I reached the bench at the back of the hall. The voice was that of a woman reading an old letter from a young man to his love across the sea. Letters from other immigrants followed, often read by their children or grandchildren. The matters of which they wrote were so relatable and timeless that i couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of solidarity with them. I identified with their struggles as well as their successes.The letters were read in their original tongue as well as in English, increasing their accessibility.  “A cloud of paper floats these letters across time and space…” readed a portion of the description on the wall.

The oral history tour started on the ground floor of the museum in front of the biographical exhibit for the museum’s namesake, Wing Chong Luke. Only two other people were waiting for the tour, so the group was small. Our guide, Don, was incredibly personable; he asked where we were all from, and chatted about his family and where he was from. His casual conversational style lent itself perfectly to the tour. At times I could hardly distinguish what was planned in his presentation, and what came organically. For instance, Don revealed his parents were actually from the same province of China as Wing Luke. He told us of the first time he visited their old home and his surprise at finding the people of China to be extremely warm and welcoming towards him. “There was a time when American born Chinese people were not well received there,” he informed us. Traveling for Don had been a great learning experience, and he encouraged all of us to travel to China some day. “Travel transcends racial lines.” he said.

As Don covered the life of Wing Luke, the part of his story which seemed the most significant took place in his childhood. In primary school he was the only non-caucasian child, and was picked on terribly. Wing, we were told, was also an incredible artist. Don asked us, “So, if you could draw really well, and all of these kids were picking on you, how would you draw them?” I looked kind of bashful and hesitated. “I guess I would make them look pretty stupid,” I said. Don nodded, “Well Wing didn’t do that, he wanted these kids to like him, and so he drew them all as superheroes!” As it turns out, this worked. Wing became one of the most well liked boys in his entire class. A class photo with Wing standing at the center, with all the students smiling, added a pleasant visual ending to the story.

The tour moved to the front of the museum where we learned about the history of how the International District was built and then outside where we could look at the city directly. The tour then moved to the East Kong Yick Building, which was donated to the museum after it closed. The store, which was rebuilt as a part of the museum, is still filled with all the original jars of dried goods and account books. Don revealed that he used to come to the shop in it’s original location as a child. He would buy dried plums as a treat and help his brother carry the 100 lb bag of rice his mother would purchase there every month. More and more I was realizing that Don was himself a part of the story he was laying out for us.

From the Yick building we moved onto the Freeman Hotel, which was one of the first resting places of many immigrants coming to Seattle from Asia. The hotel rooms were small and sparsely furnished. It was hard to imagine that these rooms were used as permanent living quarters for grown men. The hotel also contained meeting rooms for Family Associations. Family Associations were essentially clubs comprised of people who came from the same provinces in China, and wanted to recapture the sense of the community they had when living in their old villages. The first of such banquet style meeting rooms we entered belonged to the Gee How Oak Tin Family Association, the largest in the nation. Such associations are a testament to how important maintaining a sense of community was in the early days of the international district. It also demonstrates the creative ways in which immigrant populations go about maintaining a sense of cultural identity and how they valued the roots of their past. After learning about the history and structure of family associations we moved into the adjoining room which stood for yet another family association and displayed a collection of antique mahjong tiles, a traditional Chinese game similar to dominoes.

Don lead us all to the window and pointed to the other side of King street. “Do you see that building over there?” he asked. Another type of association in the area was known as a tong, which was originally a secret business organization generally of ill repute. They were known to be involved in gambling, smuggling, and even prostitution once upon a time, but have since become merely places for older chinese people to gather socially. Don’s father was actually a member of the Bing Tong Association, which we could see from the window. He often kept that part of his life secret from his family. Yet, Don does remember his father showing him card tricks, and demonstrating how easy it would be for him to swindle any rube who tried their luck at gambling with the tong.

The tour ended where I began, at the “Letter Cloud.” Don left us with the message that the stories the museum tells are a part of us all, they are stories of immigration, of struggle, and of seeking the American dream.Those who visit the museum aren’t only supporting it financially, but are participating in keeping certain memories alive. In addition,we spread our new found knowledge and insight to the rest of the community when we leave. “It’s Your Museum!” say the flyers sitting outside the museum entrance.

From the first moment I walked into the museum, I was made to feel welcome. The museum staff all seemed pleased with my presence. They sought to encourage my curiosity as I asked questions, and received the knowledge I had to impart with grace and respect. Through out the tour Don engaged with us by asking us questions rather than simply giving us answers. Because of how the tour was conducted I was able to recognize when I was learning something new, as well as occasionally add a bit of my own knowledge to the tour. The conversational style of the tour also allowed me to examine any previous ideas or conceptions I may have had about history. Because we were a community of learners rather than passive recipients of information the subject matter felt more relevant to me.

I was further impressed by the museums dedication towards education within the community once my tour was over. As the girl at the front desk promised I was put in touch with the director of educational outreach. He provided me with his contact information, and talked to me about the resources the library had available to me.

The museum library is located on the second floor of the museum. It’s full title is the Governor Gary Locke Library and Community Heritage Center, or GGLLCHC. The library is home to books, oral history interviews, articles, archives, photographs, videos, and art all relating to Asian Pacific American history and culture. Though the museum does not lend out its materials, there is no admission charge for anyone wishing to utilize it’s resources. I took this as further proof of the Wing’s open and welcoming nature as well as their dedication to community education.

The exhibits themselves, both through medium and content made me feel I was a part of the community I was learning about. The use of what I call full immersion exhibitions were incredibly powerful. To be standing on the street, looking out over the horizon of Seattle while I learned about it reminded me that there is a wealth of knowledge about the IND’s history and culture outside of the walls of the museum. Because I live so close to Seattle, I can venture into the city myself and make connections to the community directly, the museum is merely a jumping off point. The Wing Luke Museum web site and staff encourage visitors to explore independently on their visitation page. Being able to walk through the Yick Fung shop and the Freeman Hotel, as if suspended in time, transported me back to the past and allowed me to adopt a different perspective far more easily than by looking at pictures in a book. The recreation of scenes and places of the past by the museum intensified my empathy for people who now exist only as memories. Lastly, the story about Wing Luke using kindness to make friends with the students who were teasing him really highlighted the museum’s message that community and understanding is important, and that it can be achieved through compassion and education.

Don’s background was also an important factor in his aptitude as a guide, because as it turned out, he had a personal connection to the museum’s subject matter.   His memories of the area as a child brought the subject matter quite literally to life as it was embodied by him. Hearing about the IND from someone who actually grew up there, and who has a place in the history we were talking about made it a very personal experience. Listening to an oral history from someone who could provide a personal perspective to enhance the information I was receiving made me realize how relevant this topic still is to the Seattle community today.  Learning about the area’s history and culture from a person with roots in it inspired in me, as I am sure it does in others, a sense of solidarity, and connection. People help us connect because compassion is a gateway to enlightenment.

My ability to relate, through post memory, on some level to the early Asian immigrants that came to Seattle stems from my own family history. My great grandparents immigrated to Seattle around the turn of the century as well, and though their arrival was not met with the same hostility and injustices as the early Asian settlers many of their struggles would have been similar; repressing cultural practices and language, attempting to adapt to a strange environment, and striving to carve out a place in a society that sees you as an outsider. Even today, just like the early immigrants of the 1900s, we are all struggling to achieve our goals, and find our place in society while maintaining our own identity. Finding fundamental connections to others through shared experiences creates a bridge between communities, and makes it easier to empathise with experiences which we may never have been exposed to personally. This is the foundation for a caring and successful community.

The Wing Luke museum understands the importance of  people in the learning and preservation process, which is why they make sure that the people of Seattle’s International District play a key role in the museums design. While conducting some research through the museum’s web site (wingluke.org) I learned a great deal more about how the museum has excelled as a community driven organization. In 1995 the museum won the National Award for Museum Services for their “cutting edge work in fostering broad-based participation in the development of exhibitions and programs.” The museum’s goal is to get the Pacific Asian American communities and the public at large to become engaged with learning about the cultures and histories tied to the IND and to participate in the growth of the museum. One way they do this is by using the Community-based Exhibition Model. Community members are involved in the process of making exhibits every step of the way, from brainstorming ideas to installing exhibits, to outreach and publicity. The team of people that puts together an exhibit always includes not only staff members, but “core community members,” which make up the Community Advisory Committee(CAC). The members of this group all have some personal connection to the subject matter of the exhibit to be created. They are the ones with authority over the the content of the exhibit, and what it’s main messages are. The CAC is also charged with branching out further into the community, inviting others to contribute their talents or stories to the formation of the exhibit. On occasion, a leader is necessary for the group to run smoothly. Such a person is chosen based upon their strong role within the community rather than a history in museum work. They help by facilitating group meetings, connecting the museum further with the community, and sharing their wisdom in general.

As I learned about the process  the museum goes through to design their exhibits, and how much they value the community in the process, I began to further value where I fit into the equation. As a patron  of the museum I support it financially, but I also come as a vessel for the knowledge and the wisdom its stories would bestow upon me. I matter in this community for the simple and powerful fact that I care. Because I care so deeply about this community and their stories, I carry them with me, and thus bring parts of the museum with me wherever I go. I  am not the only one of course, many others share my role, but our role is also an important part of the process because our passion for the museum spreads awareness to others, who in turn become interested in visiting the museum. In this way, stories and community keep history alive.

I believe that Wing Luke is truly is a community museum, in that it preserves the history of a community, promotes communal memory, and creates it’s own community within and beyond its walls.

On my second visit I chose to do a little exploring of the exhibits on my own. I wandered about in solitude for the majority of the time as few other visitors were there at the same time as me. The Central Gallery was my first stop. The Gallery, which is supported by the Allen Family Foundation, is a permanent exhibition space titled “Honoring Our Journey.”  The dimly lit gallery is a peaceful space filled with numerous artifacts, images, stories and sounds all meant to preserve the memories and cultures of early Pacific Asian settlers in the Northwest.

As I walked into the gallery I was confronted by a text adorned wall which gave a brief introduction to some of the sentiments behind the exhibition space. The display is titled “Honoring Our Journey: Asian Pacific Americans,” and goes on to explain what it means to belong to this group. They are “Members of thriving communities” who share a “common history and common experience in America.” Their goal is to ban together so that they may have “their history known, their voices heard, and their needs addressed.” Their hope is that by coming together as a community and honoring their roots, whether they be “multiracial, gay, straight, or intermarried (etc.), they will gain deeper insight into their own identity.

While reading this passage I began to place the concept of identity within the theme of community. The passage, while praising the collective efforts of the APIA community to honor their connections also made a great effort to point out that not all those who are APIA are the same.

The nearest exhibit within reach of the entrance was a collection of portraits placed above an artificial mantle. The portraits were of dolls, and a caption was placed near them:”We recreate old cultural ways in their homes…” The dolls were a physical reminder of the land their owners left behind. The rest of the caption expressed the concerns Asian immigrants had with not belonging in American society, as well as their struggle to keep the memory of their origins alive. The latter is expressed by the quote “memories of the homeland dissolve with time.” The exhibit made me think about the importance of memory and honoring one’s origins in maintaining a sense of identity. I realized that because the dolls were meant to preserve immigrant memories by way of being a  physical representation of the past, objects could be directly linked to identity in a way that was not superficial.

As I moved deeper into the gallery I found a bench sitting in front of a wall on which images of Asian American culture were being projected. As I looked to my left I saw that pristinely stenciled words adorned the smooth surface of a cement wall. There were two sections of text. The first section was titled “Asian American- A New Identity.” The section talked about the term APIA, and how is was a more accurate identifying term than simply Asian: “We are both Asian and American.” The article also talked about the way in which the APIA title can be perceived as positive (strength, unity, community), or negative (separation, clannish). As I read I began to consider the conflict that can arise between communities when people try to evaluate certain aspects of their identity and how their identity can isolate them as well as create a sense of connection. Questions are asked in the paragraph about how children adopted from Asia or those of an interracial marriage identify themselves. No answer was provided for these questions, and thus I believe they were intended to give the viewer food for thought as they explored the museum.

The second part of the mural said “Remember the Past, the Struggles!” It then listed some of the civil rights movements the community had participated in, as well as some of the hurtful things that are frequently said to people of an Asian American background.

Moving on, I discovered a case filled with symbols of different Asian cultural traditions. The case held buddhist statues, wooden carvings which depicted a Korean wedding party, and a collection of religious symbols. The exhibit presented the idea that “tradition provides depth and meaning to one’s life”, and that tradition has “deep roots” often based in folk beliefs, and is “kept alive through ritual.”

After exploring the Main portion of the Central Gallery I decided to wander in the direction of the Kid’s Center. Near the entrance to the children’s portion of the gallery there were two little trees covered entirely in colorful paper tags.  The tags were New Year wishes which people wrote for their loved ones and hung on the little trees in the hopes that they would come true. This Chinese tradition appeared to have been popular with visitors, and I found that rather touching.

The children’s center was decorated lavishly with mostly Chinese  New Year decorations. A large dragon puppet, the kind seen snaking down the street in New Year parades, hung from one corner of the ceiling, and near it hung a large happy mask meant to resemble the face of a doll. Little red envelopes, which are used to present children with money on on New Year’s Day for good luck, were pinned accross the wall. A panel on the wall talked about the significance of the New Year in the context of tradition, and the exchange of such of cultural practices to new generations and new communities. The first portion reads: “Asian immigrants settling in the Pacific Northwest bring with them many holidays from their homelands…Here in America [APIAs] pass along their traditions to their children.” The piece continued by talking about how the APIA community practice their traditions not only at home with family but in the community. The celebration of the New Year is compared to other holidays such as St. Patrick’s day, because though it did not originate in America, it has been adopted by American culture. The piece continues with “While many New Year traditions have changed to accommodate new surroundings in America, their essence still remains.”

After wandering about the children’s center a bit more, I moved into the adjoining hall which contained the Community Portrait Gallery. The gallery contained 5 exhibits at the time: I Am Filipino; Vietnam in the Rearview Mirror; Alaskeros: A Documentary Exhibit on Pioneer Filipino Cannery Workers; Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial; and Hometown Desi: South Asian Culture in the Pacific Northwest.

I Am Filipino was a very interesting piece which took up an entire room. On one wall of the room there were pictures of dozens of people, all of whom were of Filipino descent. Every individual looked incredibly unique, and every one of them had a different definition of what it is to be Filipino. One quote said, “ It is hard to say what being Filipino is. It can be anything.” Oral history stations were set up around the room so that the visitor could listen to interviews done with various Filipino individuals on the topic of their experience with identity. One woman who was interviewed talked about how she manages to balance her new identity as an American and her Filipino identity. She referred to herself as a “weekend Filipino.” The term refers to living a lifestyle that requires her to suppress her Filipino identity during the week and while she works, and only participating in the traditions of home during her off days.

At another oral history station a young woman named Karen Johnstone reflected on what it is like for her to be fair skinned and have a dark skinned Filipina mother. She also talked about the struggle her mother had with being dark skinned and having a fair skinned mother. “She definitely made efforts to make connections but she also felt very isolated,” Karen said about her mother. Karen said she learned a lot from her mother about the importance of self esteem when it comes to identity: “She taught me and I have learned through her and through my own experiences as being very fair skinned and also being very immersed in the Filipino Community, that I have to accept myself, and true, there will be those who will question or reject me, but I’m not going to let them take away my identity.”

As I wandered through the rest of the Gallery I found many similar presentations of identity as something complex and fluid. The matter of identity seemed to be of great importance not only to the Filipino population but to many other Immigrants living in America. People belonging to the Vietnamese, Cambodian,and Indian communities all had important things to say about the nature of identity.

At the end of my self tour there was another photo collage that said “South Asian identities are complex, layered, and fluid.” Under each photo was a short description of that person’s identity as they saw it.

I stayed until the museum started to close, and spent the last few minutes sitting on the bench in the Central Gallery. In those last few minutes I sawtwo other visitors. They were a young couple, the male was caucasian and the female was of Asian descent. I watched them as they explored some of the exhibits and as the young woman explained how one of the traditional Japanese dresses was worn. They giggled and smiled and flirted as they explored. Soon the announcement was made that the museum was closing, and I gathered my things and made for the exit. As I left the museum I felt a strong sense that I had gained further insight into the nature of being Asian American in the Northwest.

My visit revealed a lot to me about the importance of memory both personal and collective in the formation of identity. One of the major challenges in maintaining an authentic sense of identity for the APIA people is balancing a respect for the past without ignoring their unique role in the present. The passing down of stories and the continuing practice of traditions serves as a catalyst for post and collective memory. Traditions not only travel with people to new countries and new homes, but they integrate themselves into that community as well, and may even become part of other cultural identities. I feel that the ability to share traditions and allow them to adapt while still retaining their essence is a fundamental tool for helping people to connect across cultures.

My visit also reminded me that it is helpful to have a tangible representation of the past. Because time is such a great oppositional force against memory, an object, like a doll, can be a valuable tool for keeping the past alive. Objects and the traditions they are related to root people to their collective past, and therefore have a substantial impact on the formation of their identity.

The exhibits of the central gallery and the  Community Portrait Gallery also made me consider the challenges people face not only in the process of discovering their identity, but in the presentation of that identity as well.

As I explored the Community Portrait Gallery I saw a clear continuation of the theme of identity. The variation in identity amongst Asian Americans and their struggle to maintain a sense of tradition, while still integrating themselves into America appeared to be the major concentration.

The values of community and identity seemed to be interwoven continuously throughout the museum’s portrayal of  Pacific Asian American history in the Northwest.  Identity is complex and deep in that it is inseparable from those who came before you, because to understand your role in the present you must understand how the actions of those in the past have shaped the world around you. Also, because post memory  is another type of communal memory, both influence how we think about ourselves, especially in relation to others. My visit to the museum demonstrated how balancing individual identity with having a larger role in the community can be difficult but also rewarding.

I also came to realize that I am a part of a community which has subcultures within it, one of those subcultures is the APIA community. I interact with members of that community almost every day, so learning more about their history and concerns with identity allows me to be more compassionate and understanding. I understand better now how to support my friends and peers with ties to Asian American culture.

People do not exist in isolation, to understand yourself you have to understand the people around you. This is a reality which the Wing Luke Asian Museum  understands, and they use this knowledge to design their exhibits in a way that reaches out to individuals, but then shows them how important they are to the IND community at large. They do this by pointing out the visitors power to help preserve communal history, support museum and the IND community at large, and contribute personally to communal education. My understanding of my own identity and relationship to the International District has been strengthened by my exploration of the Wing Luke museum, as has my resolve to educate myself and others further on the importance of education and understanding through community and self reflection.

David Grabin

Memory Project

5/14/2015

I see my mother as a remarkably strong and independent woman. She is an entrepreneur, and president of a thriving family owned business. Growing up, she was always there for me, yet wasn’t always so easy to get to know. She is reserved almost to the point of aloofness, with a taciturn demeanor which seems to suggest that she is emotionally unavailable.

I know that she has endured her share of hardship over the course of her life, and I very rarely press her to reveal any of the struggles that I could always perceive continue to haunt her. She raised me as a single mother, and throughout my upbringing we coexisted by mutually respecting each other’s space and boundaries. Since I’ve reached maturity we’ve rarely gone out to do things together apart from family functions or the occasional sit-down meal. When I made up my mind to move from New York to Washington State to return to school and look for work, with no intention of returning, I was neither surprised nor offended by the lack of apparent emotion with which my mother received the news. Over the years I had come to expect that kind of silent support and lack of drama from her. What I did find totally unexpected was that, when I called her up a month after the move to announce my intention to briefly return home to pick up my car and drive it back to Washington, she immediately volunteered to come along for the journey. She said that as she prepares for retirement it would be fun to take the time off, enjoy the ride, and see my new place. I was taken aback by her unexpected spontaneity, but I quickly agreed, relishing the opportunity to take our long overdue first road trip together.

It wasn’t long until I had arrived home and we were throwing our lightly packed bags into the car. We set out , and in no time we had crossed the George Washington bridge, waved goodbye to the New York City skyline, and were swallowing whole sections of open road as my Mustang hit the highways of Pennsylvania like a wild horse seeing the open plains for the first time. It wasn’t long before my mother started complaining. “This state never ends. I remember coming through here with my sister Susan years ago, and after hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania I was begging her to turn around.” “Mom,” I chided gently, “pretend we’re not even moving, and we have no destination. It will be days before we get there. If you try to measure our progress like this, you’ll drive us both crazy. Let’s just focus on having a good time and making the most of each other’s company.”

I started telling her about my progress in school, and how I’ve been engaged in a course dealing with subjects of time and memory. It was then that I was confronted by another massive surprise. After years of silence and secrecy, my mother had decided to open up about her own past and the trauma of her sister’s death. I immediately recognized the value of her story. It represented not only the life and tragically untimely death of my mother’s beloved sister, but also highlights the struggles and trepidations of many other gay people during an oppressive and tumultuous time period. After speaking with my mother, my mother’s girlfriend, and even her therapist and combining those first hand perspectives of older generations with my own cultural vantage point, a picture began to emerge of a story that is seldom told: the emotional and psychological toll that societal pressure can take on homosexuals when they are given the message their whole lives that who they are, by their nature, is illegitimate and wrong.

I asked my mom what had prompted her to broach the subject after so many years of keeping it to herself. “When my father passed away a few months ago, my sister Debby and I had to go through the house to sort through things and throw away what we can.” She said. “I’ve been looking at letters from Susan to me and me to Susan, and Susan to my parents and my parents to Susan, and from me to my parents etc, etc, etc. All permutations and combinations. It’s brought it all back very vividly. For me this was the biggest trauma in my life. I wish I weren’t still mad at my parents. I wish I could resolve that anger.” She admitted.

Once I got her talking, I was thrilled to hear the words pouring out of her without effort, her forthright flow of oral history steadily feeding my thoughts like the wind was feeding the windmills on the horizon. In the past, for me to question my mother about anything felt like conducting my own little Spanish Inquisition. After having to endure agonizingly long pauses in the conversation, my inquisitive efforts would be rewarded with only the most minimalist responses. It felt as if making her speak was akin to torturing her. When I expressed my distress she would assure me that it wasn’t just me who felt that getting anything out of her was like pulling teeth. Over the years many other people have told her that she’s not always easy to communicate with. I reflected on all this as we rolled down the highway. I couldn’t believe my luck that she was willing to be so open. It would have been most convenient for my mother to drive while telling her story so that I could focus my whole attention on her, but first I had to re-teach her how to drive stick shift since six-speed transmissions hadn’t been invented at the time that she last drove a manual car. She had only ever used four-speeds. In yet another surprising turn of events, my mother, who could have requested senior citizen discounts if her pride would allow it, proved herself perfectly capable of learning how to drive my sports car.

It wasn’t until days later, with my mom at the wheel peering stoically at the road through her dark sunglasses, advancing towards the setting sun in the Black Hills of North Dakota in my steel grey mustang, looking like quite the badass,that the topic of my aunt Susan came up again. I asked my mom how the trip we were taking compared with the journeys she used to go on with Susan.”You and I, right now, are driving across the country as fast as we can. What we did then was to stop and enjoy things, and sight see. Other than that, the country looks just the same. It’s the way I remember it” she said.

“What did you guys do on your trips?” I asked.”We talked all the time. We talked very easily. We talked about ourselves. We talked about everything.” Was her reply. “What kind of trips did you go on?” I said, to build some momentum. “We would go all around” she replied. “When we would get to where we were going we would play tennis, or we would find a lake and go swimming or sunning. When we drove across the country we went to all the national parks that we could. We camped, which took up a lot of time and energy. That was pretty wonderful, too.” I paused for a moment, trying to imagine what it must have been like.

“So you guys were only four years apart. Did you look up to her when you were growing up?” I asked. “I did. We looked alike. We almost passed for twins. On the telephone no one could ever tell us apart. If I had homework to do or a test to study for, I could go to her and she would help me with it. I thought she was very cool. She was very funny. She was different, and she marched to her own drum, and I appreciated that.” she said proudly.

“Was she a good role model for you?” I asked. “Well, my parents always said that I started smoking because of Susan, and it’s true. I watched her smoking and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. As soon as I could, I started smoking. My parents thought that she gave the worst possible example. They never approved of her friends. They approved of mine but they never approved of Susan’s. At that time they were called hoods. They were tough guys in the school. She belonged to a sorority when she was in high school. Not something that a Jewish girl usually did. And the sororities were kind of tough. The girls wore jackets with the back collar up and things like that. This was the early 60’s, and there were different groups in high school at that time. That was when Elvis Presley was big. A lot of guys who were tough wore their hair slicked back. They kind of looked like James Dean. They would roll up the sleeves of their t shirts and put a packet of cigarettes into the sleeve. They wore their pants a little short with white socks and loafers. Girls wore bouffant hair styles. The girls in the sorority had sorority jackets that they wore. These were not girls who were going to college. Susan was smart, she was very smart, but she chose to be with these girls instead. Maybe she was insecure and this is who she felt she could be comfortable with.”

“So growing up you must have seen her get into trouble a lot. Did that have any effect on you?” I asked. “I spent a lot of time being in between my sister and my parents. Trying to explain my sister to my parents. Trying to explain my parents to my sister, and being mad at all of them. I felt very protective towards her. Sometimes I was mad at her for things she did, but I took her side almost all the time. She was difficult. She was very difficult. She was rebellious, she acted out, she didn’t behave in school, she always gave my parents a hard time. I don’t think my parents dealt well with her. For instance, when they discovered that she was gay, they took her into a room just the three of them. They were yelling at her and they were berating her and they were screaming at her. I was outside the room beside myself. It was such a big dirty secret at that time. Nothing you could tell anybody. I was never ashamed of her no matter what she did.”

“How did your parents find out about Susan?”

“They had intercepted a letter that Susan got from a woman she was involved with and read the letter. This was the summer after I had finished High School, right before I started college. I was upstate at a summer camp. They drove all the way up there to tell me that my sister was a  homosexual, and then demanded to know if I was one too. They said that if I was they would commit suicide together.  For most of her life my parent’s didn’t treat Susan right, especially when they found out that she was gay. They were terrible to her. They said terrible things. She loved my parents like crazy even though she had a lot of trouble with them. She wanted their approval, but they never approved of her. Certainly not when they found out she was gay. One of the things my father said to her at that time was “I’m leaving, but I’m not sure I can leave you alone with your mother’”

“At that time, was your parent’s attitude towards homosexuality unusual, or typical?”

“Homosexuality was viewed with scorn and disgust. Openly with scorn and disgust. People would even be willing to say something in the street. Two men wouldn’t dare to walk down the street hand in hand. If it became obvious that they were gay, they could be beaten up severely. Even if it was two women there would be terrible comments that would be passed. The funny thing is that my parents were liberal thinkers. I don’t think they would have been homophobic except that their own daughter turned out to be homosexual. That just made them crazy. I mean they said ‘you’ll never have a normal life, you’ll never have children, you’ll never marry,’ but it was more about them. What will people think of them because their daughter is gay? They’ll never be grandparents, and they’ll never be able to see her have a normal life. I felt that it was always about them and not about her. If they had thought about her, and what things meant to her, they could have acted very differently. It would have made  a very big difference.”

As my mother confided all this to me I watched her closely to see what additional message her body language might reveal. Surely the topic was not easy for her to discuss, yet she betrayed no discomfort and delivered all this without a trace of emotion. In fact, she still looked pretty stylish behind the wheel of the Mustang GT, with her short curly hair barely clearing the top of the red leather seat. The road stretched before us across the high plains without so much as a curve in sight, and it seemed to me that we were headed on an entirely distinct journey within the confines of the car’s small cabin. Emboldened by her apparent willingness to divulge the story and relieved by her lack of emotional distress, I pressed on.

So how did all of this affect Susan?

My mother went on to discuss some of the grizzly details of Susan’s struggles with alcoholism and depression, which she has always believed to be closely related to Susan’s difficulties in coming to grips with her own sexual identity and her parent’s brutal condemnations. Susan was initially kicked out of college before returning to ultimately complete her degree and become an elementary school teacher. In Susan’s younger years my mother can vividly recall more than one of Susan’s suicide attempts which seemed to her like cries for help. At one point Susan attempted to end her life by ingesting an entire bottle of aspirin, and my mother says that even though she was very young at the time she can still picture all the little white capsules floating in the toilet after Susan regurgitated them. When speaking of Susan’s drinking problem, my mother was quick to point out that even though alcoholism does have a genetic component, we do not have any kind of family history of it.

“Susan had two big problems. One was that she was an alcoholic, and the other was that she was gay. She wasn’t able to let being gay make her happy, so she was depressed. The drinking wasn’t making her any less depressed, either. You could really tell it just by looking at her that she was not comfortable with herself. By the way she was really very beautiful, and very smart. She had a lot of reason to feel good about herself but she didn’t. I don’t know if it’s an outrageous thing to say, but I think she also drank to get through certain social situations. Yes, I think there was a connection between her drinking and her sexuality. I know that very often when she slept with boys she did it as drunk as hell.” Suddenly we were interrupted.

“Look, an antelope! Were those antelope?” Exclaimed my mom. “Yeah, good eye. How did you spot that?”

My mother and my aunt Susan were inseparable up until the time of Susan’s tragic death. I asked my mother if Susan ever confided in her about any of her deepest issues, but my mother replied that she just didn’t have the skills at that time to conduct that kind of conversation. I’m sure it doesn’t help that many of the topics would have been taboo, and repression was the climate of the times. Finally the conversation came around to the inevitable moment where I was to ask my mom about my aunt’s death.

“You know, to this day, you’ve never told me the whole story of Susan’s death. Now would you be willing to tell me the details of what happened?”

“I’ll tell you what happened that day. Well first of all the year was 1981, so she must have been 35. Susan went and had therapy. She was having therapy with someone she called ‘the child’ at a place called Peninsula Counseling. After Susan’s appointment her therapist called me at about six o’clock at night and said ‘I saw your sister today. She said she’s going to kill herself, so I wanted you to know.’ I hung up with her and immediately called my parents and told them what the therapist had said. Susan was very depressed at the time. There was no question of not taking it seriously. I went over to their house, and we decided we would check all the bars in the neighborhood because Susan often went out drinking. We drove around downtown, and I went into each bar looking for her. It was a pretty crazy thing to do. We didn’t find her that way, so after that I told my parents that I thought we should call the police, but they didn’t want to. I kind of insisted, and we did, we called the police. We went to her apartment in Lynbrook, the three of us. At first we were looking for her there too, but we ended up staying there all night. I remember my mother said to me ‘gird yourself for the worst.’ I was so mad at her for saying that. My father slept and my mother and I wrung our hands all night. In the morning my father went to work. My mother and I went back to the house” my mom said with a sigh”

After a pause, she added “In a little while my father called and he said that a state trooper came into the office to say that Susan was dead. I always try to control myself and not show too much what I’m feeling, but I took my fists and I banged them against the wall, and I said ‘Nooooo!!’ What happened was that she left her therapist’s office and had gone straight to Herman’s sporting goods to buy a rifle. She drove upstate on the NY State thru way and in a moving vehicle she shot herself in the head. This was unbearable horror to me. Unbearable.

I stayed with my mother until my father got home, then I started pacing in the street. I was walking up and down East Broadway waiting for my sister Debby because I couldn’t bear to go back to the house and face their grief. It was just shock and horror. I felt so bad for my parents I could hardly stand it. They huddled together in their grief. Meanwhile I had just missed an appointment with my own therapist. It was the furthest thing from my mind. I went to the therapist’s office anyway. This is not the way I behave, but even though he was with another patient I just walked in and he sent the other person away. I said ‘my parents said that my sister is dead and I don’t believe them.’ So he got on the phone and called my parents and then said ‘yes, she is.’ So, that was that day.”

Not only had I never heard any part of this story and was only recently told that my aunt’s death had been a suicide, but that it was also kept hidden from me for many years that Susan was a lesbian. It is almost as if the guilt that I can only imagine being tied into her death extended to her sexuality as well. The first time that I learned anything at all about my aunt Susan, other than that she died in a car accident before I was born, I was already in my 20’s. I’m under the impression that no one in my extended family on my mother’s side, including her cousins who she is still close with, ever heard the full story.

Perhaps if things had gone differently with my aunt it might have changed the entire course of my mother’s life, and removed many obstacles from her path. It turns out that my grandparent’s initial fears were justified that day when they confronted her at summer camp. My mother was a lesbian all along, although she did her best to hide it even from herself. Her first marriage to a man named Phillip who had been her best friend in High School ended after a few years when Phillip came out of the closet as gay and divorced her. He later died of AIDS in the ’80s. She remarried to my father, but that marriage also ended in failure when I was still a child. It wasn’t until years later that my mother had the courage to confront the root cause of her unhappiness which revealed itself to her in part due to years of therapy.

As we plodded on through the treeless expanse of North Dakota my mother went on to describe to me her tentative journey towards self acceptance. She acknowledges that deep down she knew the whole time that she was gay, but circumstances and outside pressure made her inclined to reject that part of herself.

“I didn’t want to be gay.” she said. “I wanted to have a normal life. I wanted to have a child. None of that was possible in those days. There was no gay marriage. There were no gay couples having children. I don’t know exactly how to explain it. I feel like I wasn’t brave enough to do it. If I had been braver I would have said ‘this is who I am, this is what I want, and I’m gonna do it’. I couldn’t.”

She readily admits that a part of why it took her so long to reach the point of being honest with herself was her experiences with her parents and sister growing up, especially her parents telling her they would kill themselves if she was gay, which she is able to laugh about now.

“I also remember when my therapist told me that according to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) homosexuality was no longer considered a sickness. In Susan’s time it was considered a mental problem to be gay. One day I found out that it wasn’t anymore. My therapist also helped me come to terms with it because she said ‘gay or not gay, what’s worse is nothing.’”

My mother decided that since I was grown, if ever there was a time to make a move it was then. She started by going to gay bars on a few occasions and just sitting quietly in the corner. She just wanted to see how she felt about the whole thing, not unlike dipping a toe in to test the water. At first this only made her feel more alienated. She said to herself “Oh my god, who am I? I don’t know.” Eventually she joined Match.com and she slowly began acclimatizing herself to the tremendous change of dating women. She describes the process:

“I was still very confused. I remember once I was talking to my therapist. I had gone out on a date with somebody, and at the end of the date she kissed me. I said to the therapist ‘she kissed me!’ and she said “Jackie, that’s the whole point. What did you think you were doing? Did you think you were making friends with people?”  My mother chuckled at this. “And then there was another woman I saw for months and months and we never kissed. I never wanted to kiss her, I never wanted her to kiss me. I liked her well enough. I had a good time in the city, but I didn’t like the way her hair smelled. I didn’t really want anything to do with her physically, so eventually we stopped seeing each other. There were a few others, but there was never anything really very much that went on sexually. I was still trying to wrap my mind around it and see how I felt.”

Eventually my mother ended up meeting Jo’, who has been her partner for the past six years. Even though gay marriage is now legal in New York, my mother has repeatedly stated that she’s not interested in a third marriage and is happy just the way things are. Based on their level of love and commitment to each other, in my eyes they are as good as married. As far as I can tell, my mother has never been happier than she is with Jo’. The two of them are perfect for each other, and Jo’ has brought so much joy into my mother’s life that it’s as if she’s a new person. I know that a big factor in all this is that times are changing and society is much more accepting. I see this change as having been enabling for her, and she confirmed that belief in the course of our conversation.

“I met Jo’ through mutual friends when we played golf together one time. I knew I liked her from the minute I met her, but I liked her just as friends. Eventually she and I became more than friends. It’s a whole different thing today. Because, for instance, in my family… first of all with you… eventually it happened that I had to let you know. You were okay with it. I remember exactly what happened. You found something on the computer, and you asked me point blank if I was gay. There was no way for me to get around it. I had to either lie to you or tell you the truth. So I told you the truth.  I was very scared to see how you would react, and very relieved that you seemed to be OK. I imagined you not approving. As a matter of fact my therapist said ‘Okay now David knows. That excuse is gone.’ Because I had been saying ‘how could I let David know? What would it mean to him?’ Oh, I’m going 100″ She said, laughing, as she gestured to the speedometer.

I can still vividly remember the day that I confronted my mother about her dating website. At first I was angry at her for hiding it from me for so long, but never at any point was I ashamed, embarrassed, or upset with her in any way. No negative thoughts or emotions went through my mind about her being gay at all. I would have been completely neutral towards it, if it wasn’t for the disappointing knowledge that she had been hiding it from me for years and would likely have lied to me about it rather than admit the truth had I not been able to corner her. I remember that despite my reaction of approval my mom cried anyway, which was puzzling. It was one of the rare times in my life when I had seen my mother cry. I couldn’t tell if they were tears of joy or sadness, and couldn’t fully comprehend why the conversation was so emotional for her.

It wasn’t until I heard her story that day in the car that I could understand. After growing up in a culture where the message was driven home over and over by society and even from her own family that who my mother is as a person is wrong and shameful, after all of the lies and guilt and sadness, her own son was finally accepting her. She must have been petrified of telling me for fear that I would react as so many other loved ones in her life had. I was struck by the thought that during her lifetime public perception has changed so much that when she was growing up it was acceptable to beat a gay person in the street, yet by the time she came out to me the thought of not accepting her because of her sexual orientation literally never even entered my mind.

My musings were interrupted by a gesture of excitement from my mom, as she pointed out towards the horizon. “Look over there. Do you think those are the Rockies?” she said with hope in her voice. “I believe they are.” I responded. “Look over there where the sky is black. There’s so much wide open space here that you can see where it’s raining by the black sheet coming down from the sky like a curtain, but it’s dry and sunny over here. There’s something you don’t see in New York.” I pointed out. “That reminds me. One time Jo’ and I took a road trip together and I made up a song. Did I ever sing it to you?” my mom asked. “No, go ahead” I responded, more astonished than I let on to hear that my mom had a theatrical side.

“I’m gay. I’m gay. I’m a big girl now, I’m gay. I’m 60 now and I don’t know how, but I’m gay. I’m gay” she sang to me in an upbeat tone, with a smirk on her face. “Did you really make that up? What’s the tune from?” I asked. “It’s from a Barbara Streisand song” was her reply. I chucked. “Go figure.”

The more I thought about the story the more I started to get the sense that for all the potency of her own little piece of history, there was something missing. My mother is far from apolitical. She is idealistic, has always voted, and occasionally takes a stand to support a cause that she believes in. If I had to hazard a guess, I would imagine that the reason that the events of the gay rights movement never entered the conversation with my mother is because she simply never identified as gay, and so distanced herself from gay rights issues. Even after making so much progress in coming to grips with her identity, I still don’t think she views gay rights topics as something that affects her directly. As many lesbian friends as she might have, and as many LGBT friendly social functions she may attend, she is still inclined to view herself as separate from the larger context of gay society. Her partner, Jo’, on the other hand, makes no such distinction. On the contrary, Jo’ was able to “come out of the closet” in her early teens, and has always been far more comfortable with her sexual orientation. She quite enjoys the social scene, and is happy to be a part of it. During some of our ample free time I decided to give Jo’ a call to see if she could help me piece together some of the circumstances surrounding Susan’s death.

For me, it’s always a pleasure to speak with Jo’. Her personality and my mother’s mesh quite well, and there is an uncommon depth to the bond that they share. While my mother can be shy and reticent, Jo’ is a boisterous extrovert. Luckily, in addition to being talkative, she is also knowledgeable about a variety of subjects and well spoken. She is particularly interested in history, which was suited to our conversation. After exchanging greetings and a little small talk, I asked if Jo’ could tell me more about the civil rights movement, and then gently steered the conversation towards issues of gay rights. I made mention of Susan, which was a topic that Jo’ was all too familiar with. Being in my mother’s highest confidence, I’m sure Jo’ had even still heard more than me about a topic that was still clearly on my mom’s mind after so many years.

“If you go back to the ’50s when Susan was young, imagine putting gay issues into the framework of the McCarthy era. There was so much paranoia in this country that they were throwing anybody who was suspected of being gay out of government jobs. The idea was that the Communists could use it against you if they found out your secret and blackmail you to steal information. That was the paranoia of those times. At that time you could be fired from any job for being gay, because they saw it as a kind of terrible mental illness” said Jo’.

I brought up that Susan was a teacher.

“At the time Susan was employed one could not be a teacher anywhere in this country and be gay. That was just not going to happen. Even if you were a woman teaching in an all male school, they would still fire you for it. You had influence on children. It was seen as corrupting minors” she said.

“When did all that start to change?”

“That’s pretty much the way it was until the Liberation Movement kicked off in 1969. By that time in Susan’s life she was already out for many years. The prevailing attitude at the time was that it was nurture rather than nature. In the studies that were done prior to 1975 they always said that homosexuality was caused by a family with a dominant mother and a weak father. So when a parent found out that their child was a homosexual in those days, they blamed themselves. That was why the reaction that your grandparents had was so strong. It was normal. It was what most parents felt when they found that out.”

“What about your own parents?”

“When my parents found out, they were shocked. My mother said it broke her heart because of the ramifications… as if I had no future in that. That was what made them very sad. Just as in any point of time in this country, at that time two women living together were not going to make as much money as with a man. Was I always going to be poor, not be happy, and not have a full life? This is how that conversation went.”

“Sounds a lot like what went on with Susan and my grandparents”

Susan and I are five years apart. My experience was so totally the opposite of hers… I always had it easy. If I was Susan’s age I would be having an entirely different conversation with you right now because life would have been horrible. So many people were thrown out of their houses and never had their family again. Alcoholism was a big deal in the gay community for a very long time. There were more AA groups that were formed out of the gay community than any other demographic because that was your life. If you didn’t have a partner, you went to bars every night. You were drinking all the time. You couldn’t find the acceptance within yourself. You didn’t realize you could make a life for yourself. It drove people to drink. It was a big, huge problem.

The bars were little hovels, little holes in the wall, dark, dusty, depressing places. At that time gay people were always surrounded by this message that being gay is wrong and it’s a sickness. They felt doomed to a life of abuse where they couldn’t ever be themselves. The only options for entertainment were disgusting, dark, and drab with all kinds of weirdoes around. In those circumstances you’re going to feel like you’re a freak, especially if you don’t really know any other people like you. It isolates you. It makes you go underground. But those were the only places we could go.

When the cops had nothing else to do, they would go raid gay bars. They would go into the bars. They would arrest all these guys. They would throw them into the paddy wagon, take them down to the police department, and send their names to the newspaper. The next day in the New York newspaper or whatever city you were in they would print the names of everybody they arrested in the raid. Now remember you could get fired from your job being a homosexual back then. You could get thrown out of an apartment. If you were married and on the down low your kids could be taken away from you. That was a real big deal. That’s what they used to do for sport, the police. It happened over and over and over again.

That tension with the police is what sparked the Stonewall riots. After the Stonewall riots the gay rights movement really started to gain traction, and everything changed. Part of the politics was to come out. If you came out people would realize how many of us there were. They would realize it was a neighbor, someone in their family, a teacher, or someone who they knew so it wasn’t a foreign thing anymore. It was somebody that you could actually relate to. After that was the sexual revolution in the ’70s. Everybody was out and open and carrying on. I remember the first ever gay pride parade in New York City. It was in June of 1970. It was also the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. I thought it was the most amazing thing I ever saw. I was standing on a street in New York City surrounded by tens of thousands of gay people. Even though I grew up in New York, and even though I came out in New York, it was the sheer number of people there that made me realize that something had to happen for people like us.

If Susan had hung on just a little bit longer, I think she would have revived herself a little bit and been able to enjoy life. Then maybe your grandparents might have come around.”

The more I thought about it, the more I started to see that what happened with Susan was not uncommon. It was a predictable reaction to a set of circumstances which would have been a major setback in anyone’s life. It was not an isolated incident. Her struggle to be accepted by her family, her depression, her alcoholism, were the silent struggles of a generation. How many stories like hers are never spoken, existing only as fading memories? Can you blame Susan for her alcoholism any more than you can blame her for being gay? What could have been going through her head that night that she decided to end her life? With the weight of these questions never far from my mind, I knew that I had one final phone call to make. Still on the road, with the permission of my mother, I found some privacy and contacted her therapist who had weathered most of the storm alongside my family. Although patient confidentiality prevented her from discussing any details of my mother’s relationship with her, she had some enlightening accounts from her own career.

“When I first started my career in high school I cannot tell you the number of kids who were gay who could not come out and who were driven to madness. Many of them were depressed and suicidal. They made suicide attempts. They were tortured souls. It really upset me because I knew they were suffering. I was active myself in promoting the gay straight alliance in my school district. I brought lecturers in to raise awareness for the teachers. At the end of my career an eighth grader came to me to announce that he was gay. He was completely open. He was unafraid. He was perfectly comfortable talking about it. I thought maybe nobody else knew, but he had already shared it with his parents. His friends knew. He was completely accepted. From 1979 until 2007 when I retired, there was a major, major shift in the experience of dealing with homosexual people. I was fascinated by it. I was thinking ‘oh my god. These people are attempting suicide in 1979. Some of them are getting hospitalized with depression. And in 2007 an eighth grade boy announces to me he’s gay and he’s perfectly comfortable with it.’ All in less than 30 years. It was amazing to me. It was exciting to be part of it.  Now it’s a whole new world.”

“We still have a long way to go, but we’ve come a very long way.”

The progression of the days was marked by the features of the landscape and flies upon the windshield. As our road trip was nearing its end, I drove down the highway with unfocused eyes, trying to process everything that I had just heard. I donned a pair of sunglasses as the sun began descending ahead of me. At that moment, I could almost picture my aunt Susan’s face. I held it in my mind. It was a sort of compilation of whatever pictures of her I had caught a glimpse of in old photo albums, all brought to life by my newfound insight into her personality. The Susan of my imagination was a lot like my mother.

She left behind no children, no momentous life’s work or crowning achievement. It was as if her potential was extinguished before she ever had a chance to express it. If there is one thing that I can take away from my journey with my mother, it’s the legacy of Susan’s story which has been passed down to me. Although Susan’s time was brief and has long since passed, the story of her life and the memory of her struggle will always stay with me as a guiding force. Sitting in the car alongside my mother I suddenly realized that this is the place where Susan finally found acceptance. Looking out at the road ahead, I thought about the words from that last conversation. We still have a long way to go.

Alzheimer’s: Caught Between Two Worlds
Vairea Houston

I watched as the perfect pink rose I set on my grandmother’s casket was lowered into the ground. Beautiful and serene like her, that rose would remain within the ground. I don’t think you can register that someone you love has passed until it’s staring you in the face. I then began to sob on the shoulder of my Uncle, who put his arm around me in comfort. But there is no comfort in death, so I accepted his shoulder to shield me from my own grief. My estranged family all stood in a half moon around the burial plot while the hearse driver stayed unusually close behind, watching. We all stood about five feet from each other, uncomfortable. Five days after her death, Oma (Dutch for grandmother) was here in Bainbridge Island, being buried in the plot her friend had given her. The day was bright but a breeze kept me wrapping a shawl around my arms, it seemed understandable that the day would keep its chill. It had hit me that I would never hear her tell a story again, or hold her hand as we wheeled her around when the sun came out to play. I hoped that she saw me from up above, and recognized me one last time.
Katrina Rutunuwu was born January 5th 1929 in Sumatra, Indonesia to her Indonesian parents, Martinez and Katerina Rutunuwu. She was one of fourteen children. Her father was in the Dutch army so they often moved around throughout what was then the Dutch East Indies. After Katrina was born they moved from Sumatra to Jakarta.One of her earliest memories is her family’s trip to her grandparent’s farm in Sulawesi when she was eight years old. She recalls her grandparents waking her up at 5 am to go to their fields for food. An old wagon pulled them along through the fields, led by a Caribou. You can hear the fondness of Oma’s memory as she describes the excitement all her siblings felt when told they would be traveling in a wagon for the first time. She was told to wash up in the stream before they ate. She washed her face in a cold, clear stream that ran from the mountains down through their property. It was then that Oma ate her first pineapple on that field in Sulawesi. “It was so sweet and delicious,” she said. It was five days of firsts for the children visiting their grandparents. They spent nights in a tree house while her grandma would build fires down below them to keep the wild boars from eating their crops. In the morning they would wake up to fresh rice from the fields, it was sweet and green. Her grandparents would make bbq corn, sugar cane for dessert, and make a drink out of a nearby tree that produced sweet and sour liquid. It was stories like this that my grandma would tell me when I was little and they were always so bright and vivid like you were watching them through a magnifying glass.
On December 12th, 2008 Oma was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It was then that we saw her change. She began to tell the same stories repeatedly, from forgetting where she put her jewelry, to forgetting where she was. She couldn’t live on her own anymore, so she moved from her apartment in Bainbridge Island to Crista Senior Living in Silverdale, Washington. It was a small distance from Bainbridge Island but a huge difference in her lifestyle. She was limited to the amount of things she could bring with her, she wasn’t allowed jewelry, had only a few pairs of clothes, and only a few pictures on her side of the room. She had to live with other ladies and had strict breakfast, lunch, and dinner hours to adhere to. Trips anywhere had to be done with family or on designated days with other seniors. There were days we picked her up that begged us not to take her back, so she would stay over and my mom would pamper her. It was days like those that were painful to see. I’d watch my mom walk Oma to her room and kiss her goodbye, and I saw Oma’s fear of being alone. It reminded me of when my mom would leave me in kindergarten. For the first couple week I was so confused, why did I have to be around all these strangers? My mom felt so guilty leaving her therefor she had switched from being the daughter to being the mother.
I saw her Alzheimer’s progressively advance during her stay at Crista. She had a harder time distinguishing our names, accused her family members of stealing her things, and felt threatened by her neighbors, and old friends. She began roaming the hallways at night and forgetting where she was. She went beyond the services of a senior living home and needed to be in assisted living to be completely taken care of. My mom and Uncle Rio found Crista Shores Assisted Living in Edmonds, Washington. This, where Oma spent over five years of her life, are the most vivid in my memory. The entrance gives off a warm embracing feeling that I remember mostly during the first winter she lived there. A fireplace greets you, surrounded by leather sofas, and tables offering snacks and refreshments. You receive a name tag that sticks onto your clothing for at least thirty minutes of your stay. They divide up the hallways by naming the wings after different types of trees. Oma was located in Dogwood, and all separate wings were locked with passcodes so seniors wouldn’t get lost. Although the entrance gives off an inviting feeling for guests, the rooms gave me the chills. They were all covered in white blank walls, hospital looking beds that were easily adjusted and very sparse decorations. Outside each room was a plaque describing the person living there, how old they were, and where they called home. She called herself Cathy here in America and that’s what the sign read. At the entrance to Dogwood, a sign-in book held the signatures of those that visited and the day they came. In the first few months her only visitors had been me, Leilani (my mother), Uncle Rio, and his wife Rita. Oma’s stages of Alzheimer’s had taken over aggressively in those months and it was unfortunate that the rest of our family weren’t here to see it. Other seniors were at different stages, some stages were indistinguishable by the naked eye. I saw some wander the hallways in curiosity and other glued to their beds or wheelchairs. Oma began using a wheelchair during her stay at the first living home because of the bunions that made it too painful to walk.
Being around someone with Alzheimer’s means handling with their mood swings and not looking for their recognition for your continued patience. You see a new form of this person you once knew, and so my Oma’s journey through Alzheimer’s isn’t only influenced by my observations but watching my mom see her mother differently. The absolute calmness that I saw within my mother towards Oma but also the pain of seeing someone slowly forgetting you. Oma was born into a family of fourteen children, but she could easily name every single one of them up into her early stages of Alzheimer’s. When my aunt Arisa asked her, “How do you not forget some of them?” Oma replied with, “How could I forget.” And that is one of the hardest things to watch when observing someone with dementia. Memories she thought she would never forget are suddenly harder to find within the deep recesses of our minds. Oma had so many stories to share that are important to who she was but also to understanding how to live our lives today. We didn’t hear her stories anymore after she entered Crista Shores and we relied solely on her facial expressions. At certain times she would speak but it would be a mix of the four languages she was fluent in: Malaysian, Indonesian, Japanese, and Dutch.
Katrina experienced first hand oppression when the Japanese took control of Java on March 9th, 1942. Japanese officers began taking families from their homes and putting them in internment camps to keep the Europeans from interfering with their domination. Several hundred of these internment camps existed across the East Indies and other Pacific Islands in their control. Over 300,000 people were forced to live in them. Her dad was in the Dutch army so they were immediately placed in an internment camp in the outskirts of Jakarta. The conditions that she lived during her teen years here marked some of her earliest memories. She watched as her homeland was swept up by the Japanese and taken away from her. Every Dutch citizen was stripped of all but bare necessities and taken to prison camps. Men and women were separated from each other and placed with strangers. There were schedules and regulations in the camps, times to wake up and times to go to sleep. Jobs were administered to everyone– anything from making dinner to cleaning the soldiers’ houses. Guards were constantly around, coming in and out of homes in the camp. Prisoners were expected to greet the soldiers in Japanese and not correctly pronouncing their language would upset them. Oma began learning Japanese at this time in the internment camp.
Oma was fourteen years old in the concentration camps. The barracks she lived in were far out from the city of Batavia which is now known as Jakarta. Her mother’s friend lived a couple barracks down from Oma’s house. One day her mother asked her friend to come for tea at 2:30 that afternoon but she never showed up. Oma’s told her to go get her from her house, worried that something bad had happened. Oma found her mother’s friend laying down in bed with a ten foot snake lying across her body. Oma could vividly describe the snake as it lay on the woman’s paralyzed body. She says it was old based on the amount of skin falling off it’s black, grey, and white colored body. Since Oma was the first one to find her she ran to find the owner of the property that the concentration camp was located on. The man was an animal communicator and believed that the snake was acting as the communicator for the paralyzed woman.“Are you hungry?” The snake shook his head no. “Would you like some tea?”The snake nodded it’s head yes. “How many teaspoons of sugar? One?” The snake nodded again. The man gave the drink to the woman instead while the snake lay still watching her drink it.“Would you like a cigarette?” The man asked the woman this time and she nodded approval because she couldn’t speak. When the woman would exhale the cigarette the smoke would blow into the face of the snake. Oma says the snake inhaled the smoke from the woman. The snake eventually slithered off the woman’s body and Oma followed it where it dove into a small hole in the ground outside. This large, ten foot snake went down the hole and flicked its tail and closed the dirt behind him. Not long after the snake had disappeared, the sick woman died. Oma remembers the red ants that covered the woman the day they found her dead inside the barracks. “I can see it like it was yesterday” Oma said as she recalls burying the woman in white sheets and helping her family bury her in the ground, close to where the snake had disappeared that one day. Her mother’s beloved friend was wrapped in white sheets and buried in the ground because her family had no money to do a proper Indonesian burial.
Stories like these lay in audio recordings Oma had requested my Aunt Arisa make three year before she found out she had Alzheimer’s disease. You wouldn’t know that the woman who described the colours of the snake on the woman’s body would develop Alzheimer’s. She needed total support around the clock for daily living and the quality of her care became intensively important. At Crista Assisted Living home, a few of the caregivers were from Oma’s homeland of Indonesia and spoke her native language. Oma’s children didn’t grow up in Indonesia so this grounding to her home was important for keeping her mind active. My mom and I used to take her to the “Sun Room” located inside of Crista. We would wheel her past the automatic doors leading to the courtyard that we usually booked for our day out with Oma. The room had a biblical reference painted on the sunburnt orange wall and a table faced the blinds surrounded by floral printed chairs. My grandmother was a great singer and she grew up singing songs with her family in Sulawesi. Oma couldn’t remember our names most of the time, nor how to pick up her fork but as soon as we began singing an old Indonesian song “Esamo” she would tap her hand against her leg and start to sing it. That was what astounded me. The gracefulness as her lips moved with the words, her pink lips bright (my mom had brushed them with lipstick), as if we had the old Oma back even if it was for a short time. Her gorgeous brown hair had turned to a sophisticated pearl white against dark eyes. She was happiest when she was singing even in her old age. The crow’s feet in the corner of her eyes would deceive you from seeing the hard life that she had endured.
In the summer of 2013 Oma’s youngest son Bobby died of esophagus cancer. Bobby was the life of the party, usually in high spirits, and a huge taste for adventure. He traveled the world as a crew member on multiple cruise liners, and saw places like Tahiti, Antarctica, Africa, and many more. On rare occasions he came back to his bachelor pad in Bellevue, Seattle and got around to seeing his family a few days after. He had a thirst for wanderlust that could never be quenched. Sometimes my cousin Reed and I would stay with him for a few nights and Bobby would act like our best friend instead of an adult. He’d take us inner-tubing on Lake Washington and tell us to be careful for the snapping turtles that would nibble on our feet and (trust me) we believed him. After a long day floating on the lake he would make us orange creamsicle milkshakes and pour it into two Tiki-men themed mugs. I think that most of his siblings tried to live their adventurous side through him, because at family celebrations we’d be waiting to hear about his latest story. I remember eagerly waiting for the mailman to deliver his latest collection of stamps he’d send me from some distant part of the world. But in 2009 he met his wife Toni and she whisked him along to Australia permanently and I didn’t see him again.
Bobby had many, many friends in his forty-five years alive and his death was a devastating loss for not only our immediate family. We decided that his funeral would be a celebration of life instead of a normal funeral procession. My cousins and I hand wove 130 bracelets for the guests and each prepared a small speech for the funeral. Oma had mostly forgotten our names by now and she would have no idea how to interpret us telling her that Bobby had passed away before her. My family made the heart wrenching decision to bring her to the funeral because that’s what she would have wanted. We dressed her in a traditional Muumuu that Bobby had given her long ago and wheeled her around the funeral. People would stop and give their condolences to her but she had no idea. My Uncle Bobby’s friend made a compilation of photos from Bobby’s life and we all sat around to watch while the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” played in the background. One photo was Bobby dancing with his mom, both smiling ear to ear. I looked over at Oma’s expressionless face as she looked around while this image danced on the screen. Alzheimer’s made her oblivious to her youngest son’s death and even this long standing photo of a memory couldn’t withstand the disease. As humans we take pictures to prolong a memory that has passed, to keep it as long as it is meaningful to us. When it comes to dementia, sometimes photos can’t help us. Weeks after the funeral Oma would have small moments of clarity in her thoughts. She asked us multiple times where Bobby was and my mom would tell her, “he’s on the beach in Tahiti, mom” and for the most part, I believed that too.
Oma’s life changed drastically when she met Darrell Bob Houston from Seattle, Washington. At the time they met he was a stationed writer for The Star’s and Stripes a newspaper that published articles for the U.S. Military community. A week before Oma met D.B. she was visiting her friend Connie a half Indonesian/Dutch psychic who said “Katrina, you’re going to meet someone.” Oma was suprised and replied, “How can I meet someone, I’m so short!” Sure enough her friend from Tokyo wanted to open a bar there in Indonesia but because he was a foreigner wasn’t allowed to. He asked Oma to sign her name as the owner and in return he’d pay her. So there she was, a week later, sitting on a bar stool at the bar called Sinar Bulan (Indonesian meaning moonlight.) A tall, olive skinned, American man greeted her in Indonesian, “Salamet Malon.” We later learned that he had asked someone how to say good evening just so he could meet her.
“What’s your name?” he pressed on.
“ Katrina Miller,” Oma didn’t know why but she blurted out a fake last name.
“That’s my mother’s name, Minnie Miller,” D.B. replied. After that she must have told him her real last name because he kept coming back to see her. Oma was smitten with this American man and was willing to move to the United States for him. The year was 1948 and during this time a GI had to get permission to marry a foreign woman. Between 1942 and 1952 over one million American soldiers were marrying foreign women from 50 different countries. They came from places such as Britain, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Also, 50,000 to 100,000 servicemen married women from non allied countries like the Far East and Japan. In the case of Katrina, she was from The Dutch East Indies, a non allied country. The U.S. Military was discouraging servicemen from marrying foreign women because of the impact a family could have on their duty. The military weren’t the only ones who were concerned, American women were upset with foreign women taking away their chance at being with them. Since so many soldiers were marrying foreign women, immigration laws of the U.S. prohibited the admission of foreigners to 150,000 per year. Eventually the U.S. congress passed Public law 271, The War Brides Act. The law facilitated entrance to the US for alien wives of U.S. citizens if they were in active service during World War II. Oma was granted access because of D.B. and thus became an American citizen, starting a new chapter in her life away from all she ever knew.
Darrell Bob Houston was first and foremost a writer. He wrote for The Stars and Stripes, The Guam Daily News, Seattle Weekly, Seattle P-I, Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, and Saga Magazine, The Oregon Journal, Tacoma News Tribune, and The Olympian. D.B. was lanky tall, always disheveled blonde hair, and usually spent all hours of the a.m. writing madly on his typewriter. He was very serious about his love of tennis and drinking. D.B. got a scholarship to the University of Hawaii shortly after their wedding. When my Aunt Arisa asked her what she thought of Hawaii she said, “They love me over there!” In Hawaii many Japanese lived there and Katrina loved being able to speak the language with them. At a small grocery store she went to it was opened by an older Japanese woman who let her pay on honor code because she liked her so much. Oma’s life changed drastically when she decided to become an American. She officially gained her citizenship while she was staying in Hawaii by being tutored by a professor from the University of Hawaii. Katrina and D.B. had a tempestuous relationship. Some nights he would be typewriting until dawn and others he’d be gone. By the time my mom was fourteen years old in 1969 he was pretty much permanently out of the house. Oma was struggling to provide for her three children (still at home) on her own in Seattle. They were living in a haunted house on Capitol Hill (a really dodgy neighborhood back then) by the Volunteer Park Reservoir. It was Christmas Eve and they had no heat, no money, and the only food they had was a slab of bacon and an onion. Kerrie, Bobby, and Leilani stood over by the stove warming their hands while Oma diced up the bacon and onion to make them a meal. My mom remembers, “It smelled so good but it was all we had.” My mom started crying as she thought about how hard her mom tried. The toys underneath their tree were from the Salvation Army that donated presents to poor families, they found out later that the presents inside were all broken. After their dinner my mom overheard Oma crying in her bedroom talking on the phone to her friend Leina and asking her if they could come stay the night. Leina’s son drove through the snow that night to Capitol Hill and picked them all up and made them dinner. There were a lot of nights where Oma had to make up meals like that for the family and it mostly came from her waiting in long welfare lines for food.
There were many nights like these as the rest of the children grew up and eventually left their home. Oma was strict while the kids grew up, and a life without help from their father caused many cold nights and hungry days. Decades later, Oma was on the other side of the road. Her children were now responsible for the quality of her life. The halls at Crista Shore are haunting, filled with so many people that have lost their sense of being. As I used to wander the hallways I would ask myself if I’d be the woman sitting in her wheelchair with the baby doll caressed in her arms, the woman waiting for help to lift her fork, the lady confined to her bed, or the woman with the bright eyes walking endlessly through the halls and hands clasped behind her back. On a particular visit we had spent the day in the Sun Room and my mom and I were wheeling her to the lunch room. I held her petite Indonesian hand with her long and healthy fingernails poking my palms while my mom wheeled her around the woman dispensing pills from a large cart to the patients. We set her over by the window with a few other women and wrapped a shawl around her shoulders because she kept shivering. “I’m going to go now, Mom,” my mom kneeled in front of Oma and kissed her cheek. As she got closer to grandma’s face, Oma’s eyes stared steadily back. “I love you.” My mom leaned forward and started to kiss her cheek and then got up from her knees, not expecting a response. “Love you,” Oma said. I saw my mom look at me for a
Alzheimer’s: Caught Between Two Worlds
Vairea Houston

I watched as the perfect pink rose I set on my grandmother’s casket was lowered into the ground. Beautiful and serene like her, that rose would remain within the ground. I don’t think you can register that someone you love has passed until it’s staring you in the face. I then began to sob on the shoulder of my Uncle, who put his arm around me in comfort. But there is no comfort in death, so I accepted his shoulder to shield me from my own grief. My estranged family all stood in a half moon around the burial plot while the hearse driver stayed unusually close behind, watching. We all stood about five feet from each other, uncomfortable. Five days after her death, Oma (Dutch for grandmother) was here in Bainbridge Island, being buried in the plot her friend had given her. The day was bright but a breeze kept me wrapping a shawl around my arms, it seemed understandable that the day would keep its chill. It had hit me that I would never hear her tell a story again, or hold her hand as we wheeled her around when the sun came out to play. I hoped that she saw me from up above, and recognized me one last time.
Katrina Rutunuwu was born January 5th 1929 in Sumatra, Indonesia to her Indonesian parents, Martinez and Katerina Rutunuwu. She was one of fourteen children. Her father was in the Dutch army so they often moved around throughout what was then the Dutch East Indies. After Katrina was born they moved from Sumatra to Jakarta.One of her earliest memories is her family’s trip to her grandparent’s farm in Sulawesi when she was eight years old. She recalls her grandparents waking her up at 5 am to go to their fields for food. An old wagon pulled them along through the fields, led by a Caribou. You can hear the fondness of Oma’s memory as she describes the excitement all her siblings felt when told they would be traveling in a wagon for the first time. She was told to wash up in the stream before they ate. She washed her face in a cold, clear stream that ran from the mountains down through their property. It was then that Oma ate her first pineapple on that field in Sulawesi. “It was so sweet and delicious,” she said. It was five days of firsts for the children visiting their grandparents. They spent nights in a tree house while her grandma would build fires down below them to keep the wild boars from eating their crops. In the morning they would wake up to fresh rice from the fields, it was sweet and green. Her grandparents would make bbq corn, sugar cane for dessert, and make a drink out of a nearby tree that produced sweet and sour liquid. It was stories like this that my grandma would tell me when I was little and they were always so bright and vivid like you were watching them through a magnifying glass.
On December 12th, 2008 Oma was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It was then that we saw her change. She began to tell the same stories repeatedly, from forgetting where she put her jewelry, to forgetting where she was. She couldn’t live on her own anymore, so she moved from her apartment in Bainbridge Island to Crista Senior Living in Silverdale, Washington. It was a small distance from Bainbridge Island but a huge difference in her lifestyle. She was limited to the amount of things she could bring with her, she wasn’t allowed jewelry, had only a few pairs of clothes, and only a few pictures on her side of the room. She had to live with other ladies and had strict breakfast, lunch, and dinner hours to adhere to. Trips anywhere had to be done with family or on designated days with other seniors. There were days we picked her up that begged us not to take her back, so she would stay over and my mom would pamper her. It was days like those that were painful to see. I’d watch my mom walk Oma to her room and kiss her goodbye, and I saw Oma’s fear of being alone. It reminded me of when my mom would leave me in kindergarten. For the first couple week I was so confused, why did I have to be around all these strangers? My mom felt so guilty leaving her therefor she had switched from being the daughter to being the mother.
I saw her Alzheimer’s progressively advance during her stay at Crista. She had a harder time distinguishing our names, accused her family members of stealing her things, and felt threatened by her neighbors, and old friends. She began roaming the hallways at night and forgetting where she was. She went beyond the services of a senior living home and needed to be in assisted living to be completely taken care of. My mom and Uncle Rio found Crista Shores Assisted Living in Edmonds, Washington. This, where Oma spent over five years of her life, are the most vivid in my memory. The entrance gives off a warm embracing feeling that I remember mostly during the first winter she lived there. A fireplace greets you, surrounded by leather sofas, and tables offering snacks and refreshments. You receive a name tag that sticks onto your clothing for at least thirty minutes of your stay. They divide up the hallways by naming the wings after different types of trees. Oma was located in Dogwood, and all separate wings were locked with passcodes so seniors wouldn’t get lost. Although the entrance gives off an inviting feeling for guests, the rooms gave me the chills. They were all covered in white blank walls, hospital looking beds that were easily adjusted and very sparse decorations. Outside each room was a plaque describing the person living there, how old they were, and where they called home. She called herself Cathy here in America and that’s what the sign read. At the entrance to Dogwood, a sign-in book held the signatures of those that visited and the day they came. In the first few months her only visitors had been me, Leilani (my mother), Uncle Rio, and his wife Rita. Oma’s stages of Alzheimer’s had taken over aggressively in those months and it was unfortunate that the rest of our family weren’t here to see it. Other seniors were at different stages, some stages were indistinguishable by the naked eye. I saw some wander the hallways in curiosity and other glued to their beds or wheelchairs. Oma began using a wheelchair during her stay at the first living home because of the bunions that made it too painful to walk.
Being around someone with Alzheimer’s means handling with their mood swings and not looking for their recognition for your continued patience. You see a new form of this person you once knew, and so my Oma’s journey through Alzheimer’s isn’t only influenced by my observations but watching my mom see her mother differently. The absolute calmness that I saw within my mother towards Oma but also the pain of seeing someone slowly forgetting you. Oma was born into a family of fourteen children, but she could easily name every single one of them up into her early stages of Alzheimer’s. When my aunt Arisa asked her, “How do you not forget some of them?” Oma replied with, “How could I forget.” And that is one of the hardest things to watch when observing someone with dementia. Memories she thought she would never forget are suddenly harder to find within the deep recesses of our minds. Oma had so many stories to share that are important to who she was but also to understanding how to live our lives today. We didn’t hear her stories anymore after she entered Crista Shores and we relied solely on her facial expressions. At certain times she would speak but it would be a mix of the four languages she was fluent in: Malaysian, Indonesian, Japanese, and Dutch.
Katrina experienced first hand oppression when the Japanese took control of Java on March 9th, 1942. Japanese officers began taking families from their homes and putting them in internment camps to keep the Europeans from interfering with their domination. Several hundred of these internment camps existed across the East Indies and other Pacific Islands in their control. Over 300,000 people were forced to live in them. Her dad was in the Dutch army so they were immediately placed in an internment camp in the outskirts of Jakarta. The conditions that she lived during her teen years here marked some of her earliest memories. She watched as her homeland was swept up by the Japanese and taken away from her. Every Dutch citizen was stripped of all but bare necessities and taken to prison camps. Men and women were separated from each other and placed with strangers. There were schedules and regulations in the camps, times to wake up and times to go to sleep. Jobs were administered to everyone– anything from making dinner to cleaning the soldiers’ houses. Guards were constantly around, coming in and out of homes in the camp. Prisoners were expected to greet the soldiers in Japanese and not correctly pronouncing their language would upset them. Oma began learning Japanese at this time in the internment camp.
Oma was fourteen years old in the concentration camps. The barracks she lived in were far out from the city of Batavia which is now known as Jakarta. Her mother’s friend lived a couple barracks down from Oma’s house. One day her mother asked her friend to come for tea at 2:30 that afternoon but she never showed up. Oma’s told her to go get her from her house, worried that something bad had happened. Oma found her mother’s friend laying down in bed with a ten foot snake lying across her body. Oma could vividly describe the snake as it lay on the woman’s paralyzed body. She says it was old based on the amount of skin falling off it’s black, grey, and white colored body. Since Oma was the first one to find her she ran to find the owner of the property that the concentration camp was located on. The man was an animal communicator and believed that the snake was acting as the communicator for the paralyzed woman.“Are you hungry?” The snake shook his head no. “Would you like some tea?”The snake nodded it’s head yes. “How many teaspoons of sugar? One?” The snake nodded again. The man gave the drink to the woman instead while the snake lay still watching her drink it.“Would you like a cigarette?” The man asked the woman this time and she nodded approval because she couldn’t speak. When the woman would exhale the cigarette the smoke would blow into the face of the snake. Oma says the snake inhaled the smoke from the woman. The snake eventually slithered off the woman’s body and Oma followed it where it dove into a small hole in the ground outside. This large, ten foot snake went down the hole and flicked its tail and closed the dirt behind him. Not long after the snake had disappeared, the sick woman died. Oma remembers the red ants that covered the woman the day they found her dead inside the barracks. “I can see it like it was yesterday” Oma said as she recalls burying the woman in white sheets and helping her family bury her in the ground, close to where the snake had disappeared that one day. Her mother’s beloved friend was wrapped in white sheets and buried in the ground because her family had no money to do a proper Indonesian burial.
Stories like these lay in audio recordings Oma had requested my Aunt Arisa make three year before she found out she had Alzheimer’s disease. You wouldn’t know that the woman who described the colours of the snake on the woman’s body would develop Alzheimer’s. She needed total support around the clock for daily living and the quality of her care became intensively important. At Crista Assisted Living home, a few of the caregivers were from Oma’s homeland of Indonesia and spoke her native language. Oma’s children didn’t grow up in Indonesia so this grounding to her home was important for keeping her mind active. My mom and I used to take her to the “Sun Room” located inside of Crista. We would wheel her past the automatic doors leading to the courtyard that we usually booked for our day out with Oma. The room had a biblical reference painted on the sunburnt orange wall and a table faced the blinds surrounded by floral printed chairs. My grandmother was a great singer and she grew up singing songs with her family in Sulawesi. Oma couldn’t remember our names most of the time, nor how to pick up her fork but as soon as we began singing an old Indonesian song “Esamo” she would tap her hand against her leg and start to sing it. That was what astounded me. The gracefulness as her lips moved with the words, her pink lips bright (my mom had brushed them with lipstick), as if we had the old Oma back even if it was for a short time. Her gorgeous brown hair had turned to a sophisticated pearl white against dark eyes. She was happiest when she was singing even in her old age. The crow’s feet in the corner of her eyes would deceive you from seeing the hard life that she had endured.
In the summer of 2013 Oma’s youngest son Bobby died of esophagus cancer. Bobby was the life of the party, usually in high spirits, and a huge taste for adventure. He traveled the world as a crew member on multiple cruise liners, and saw places like Tahiti, Antarctica, Africa, and many more. On rare occasions he came back to his bachelor pad in Bellevue, Seattle and got around to seeing his family a few days after. He had a thirst for wanderlust that could never be quenched. Sometimes my cousin Reed and I would stay with him for a few nights and Bobby would act like our best friend instead of an adult. He’d take us inner-tubing on Lake Washington and tell us to be careful for the snapping turtles that would nibble on our feet and (trust me) we believed him. After a long day floating on the lake he would make us orange creamsicle milkshakes and pour it into two Tiki-men themed mugs. I think that most of his siblings tried to live their adventurous side through him, because at family celebrations we’d be waiting to hear about his latest story. I remember eagerly waiting for the mailman to deliver his latest collection of stamps he’d send me from some distant part of the world. But in 2009 he met his wife Toni and she whisked him along to Australia permanently and I didn’t see him again.
Bobby had many, many friends in his forty-five years alive and his death was a devastating loss for not only our immediate family. We decided that his funeral would be a celebration of life instead of a normal funeral procession. My cousins and I hand wove 130 bracelets for the guests and each prepared a small speech for the funeral. Oma had mostly forgotten our names by now and she would have no idea how to interpret us telling her that Bobby had passed away before her. My family made the heart wrenching decision to bring her to the funeral because that’s what she would have wanted. We dressed her in a traditional Muumuu that Bobby had given her long ago and wheeled her around the funeral. People would stop and give their condolences to her but she had no idea. My Uncle Bobby’s friend made a compilation of photos from Bobby’s life and we all sat around to watch while the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” played in the background. One photo was Bobby dancing with his mom, both smiling ear to ear. I looked over at Oma’s expressionless face as she looked around while this image danced on the screen. Alzheimer’s made her oblivious to her youngest son’s death and even this long standing photo of a memory couldn’t withstand the disease. As humans we take pictures to prolong a memory that has passed, to keep it as long as it is meaningful to us. When it comes to dementia, sometimes photos can’t help us. Weeks after the funeral Oma would have small moments of clarity in her thoughts. She asked us multiple times where Bobby was and my mom would tell her, “he’s on the beach in Tahiti, mom” and for the most part, I believed that too.
Oma’s life changed drastically when she met Darrell Bob Houston from Seattle, Washington. At the time they met he was a stationed writer for The Star’s and Stripes a newspaper that published articles for the U.S. Military community. A week before Oma met D.B. she was visiting her friend Connie a half Indonesian/Dutch psychic who said “Katrina, you’re going to meet someone.” Oma was suprised and replied, “How can I meet someone, I’m so short!” Sure enough her friend from Tokyo wanted to open a bar there in Indonesia but because he was a foreigner wasn’t allowed to. He asked Oma to sign her name as the owner and in return he’d pay her. So there she was, a week later, sitting on a bar stool at the bar called Sinar Bulan (Indonesian meaning moonlight.) A tall, olive skinned, American man greeted her in Indonesian, “Salamet Malon.” We later learned that he had asked someone how to say good evening just so he could meet her.
“What’s your name?” he pressed on.
“ Katrina Miller,” Oma didn’t know why but she blurted out a fake last name.
“That’s my mother’s name, Minnie Miller,” D.B. replied. After that she must have told him her real last name because he kept coming back to see her. Oma was smitten with this American man and was willing to move to the United States for him. The year was 1948 and during this time a GI had to get permission to marry a foreign woman. Between 1942 and 1952 over one million American soldiers were marrying foreign women from 50 different countries. They came from places such as Britain, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Also, 50,000 to 100,000 servicemen married women from non allied countries like the Far East and Japan. In the case of Katrina, she was from The Dutch East Indies, a non allied country. The U.S. Military was discouraging servicemen from marrying foreign women because of the impact a family could have on their duty. The military weren’t the only ones who were concerned, American women were upset with foreign women taking away their chance at being with them. Since so many soldiers were marrying foreign women, immigration laws of the U.S. prohibited the admission of foreigners to 150,000 per year. Eventually the U.S. congress passed Public law 271, The War Brides Act. The law facilitated entrance to the US for alien wives of U.S. citizens if they were in active service during World War II. Oma was granted access because of D.B. and thus became an American citizen, starting a new chapter in her life away from all she ever knew.
Darrell Bob Houston was first and foremost a writer. He wrote for The Stars and Stripes, The Guam Daily News, Seattle Weekly, Seattle P-I, Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, and Saga Magazine, The Oregon Journal, Tacoma News Tribune, and The Olympian. D.B. was lanky tall, always disheveled blonde hair, and usually spent all hours of the a.m. writing madly on his typewriter. He was very serious about his love of tennis and drinking. D.B. got a scholarship to the University of Hawaii shortly after their wedding. When my Aunt Arisa asked her what she thought of Hawaii she said, “They love me over there!” In Hawaii many Japanese lived there and Katrina loved being able to speak the language with them. At a small grocery store she went to it was opened by an older Japanese woman who let her pay on honor code because she liked her so much. Oma’s life changed drastically when she decided to become an American. She officially gained her citizenship while she was staying in Hawaii by being tutored by a professor from the University of Hawaii. Katrina and D.B. had a tempestuous relationship. Some nights he would be typewriting until dawn and others he’d be gone. By the time my mom was fourteen years old in 1969 he was pretty much permanently out of the house. Oma was struggling to provide for her three children (still at home) on her own in Seattle. They were living in a haunted house on Capitol Hill (a really dodgy neighborhood back then) by the Volunteer Park Reservoir. It was Christmas Eve and they had no heat, no money, and the only food they had was a slab of bacon and an onion. Kerrie, Bobby, and Leilani stood over by the stove warming their hands while Oma diced up the bacon and onion to make them a meal. My mom remembers, “It smelled so good but it was all we had.” My mom started crying as she thought about how hard her mom tried. The toys underneath their tree were from the Salvation Army that donated presents to poor families, they found out later that the presents inside were all broken. After their dinner my mom overheard Oma crying in her bedroom talking on the phone to her friend Leina and asking her if they could come stay the night. Leina’s son drove through the snow that night to Capitol Hill and picked them all up and made them dinner. There were a lot of nights where Oma had to make up meals like that for the family and it mostly came from her waiting in long welfare lines for food.
There were many nights like these as the rest of the children grew up and eventually left their home. Oma was strict while the kids grew up, and a life without help from their father caused many cold nights and hungry days. Decades later, Oma was on the other side of the road. Her children were now responsible for the quality of her life. The halls at Crista Shore are haunting, filled with so many people that have lost their sense of being. As I used to wander the hallways I would ask myself if I’d be the woman sitting in her wheelchair with the baby doll caressed in her arms, the woman waiting for help to lift her fork, the lady confined to her bed, or the woman with the bright eyes walking endlessly through the halls and hands clasped behind her back. On a particular visit we had spent the day in the Sun Room and my mom and I were wheeling her to the lunch room. I held her petite Indonesian hand with her long and healthy fingernails poking my palms while my mom wheeled her around the woman dispensing pills from a large cart to the patients. We set her over by the window with a few other women and wrapped a shawl around her shoulders because she kept shivering. “I’m going to go now, Mom,” my mom kneeled in front of Oma and kissed her cheek. As she got closer to grandma’s face, Oma’s eyes stared steadily back. “I love you.” My mom leaned forward and started to kiss her cheek and then got up from her knees, not expecting a response. “Love you,” Oma said. I saw my mom look at me for a second, surprised. I shook my head, surprised back. We looked down at her. She was staring at my mom and I swear, her eyes were so clear at that moment. Growing up Oma had never told my mom that she loved her. Here was Oma, confined to this white walled hospital-like room around complete strangers but had just made my mom’s world. “I love you too, Mom,” she said it again, glued to the spot. It took all her perseverance to walk away that day and not look back.