November 13, 2019
Dear Brynn,
It’s been almost two months since we drove to Manzanar together on one of the beautiful days of early fall. It was a gorgeous trip—late night as we slipped away from the city and out to the desert stars, waking up in the tiny town hugging the slopes, against the rabbitbrush, the creosote and the blue mountains. Cold clear mountain morning, us wandering into a museum of plants, sylan before the hot days of October, before this year’s fires, which I think we knew were coming, though it felt good to be in a part of fall where they had not yet. I wanted to hike forever.
We were on a pilgrimage to a painful place, and yet the weather was maybe as lovely as I can imagine it ever being in the desert—the colors so crisp and vistas so sharp, open roads peeling away as we fell in and out of conversation.
*
One gentle day in a place that is usually so harsh. Also—the privilege of reading the day as beautiful, as dazzling, as open road.
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Then we visited barracks. And the abandoned park. And the lonely orchard of bitter pears. And all the paper cranes rattling at the Soul Consoling Tower. And the place where interned people had built a small, beautiful park to comfort themselves in the face of being contained. We stood above a dry artificial creekbed and looked at where the water would have passed under carefully placed stones. The homemade park forming a space within a space. A small and vital freedom.
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When I was 20 my best friend Jasmine invited her grandmother to have tea with my grandmother. It was the first time I consciously realized that in the same years when my grandmother had moved out of Appalachia and become a housewife and academic wife in Waterville Maine, Jasmine’s grandmother had been in an internment camp. Yes I had known this I think, but seeing our two grandmothers sit together for the first time, I imagined those years in each of their lives, those years of their lives running parallel to each other, those histories rising like clouds above our tea.
It was not something we all talked about then.
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A lot of visiting you was driving towards and away from you on 99, along that functional ugly road with its lovely parts & big aspirations. 99 of the orchards and failed sprawl and chewed up farmland. What strange and violent system built it this world of raw hems and closed outlets and FORSALE fields? Chewed on and half spat out, the imprint in the land keeps you unsettled, uneasy—narrow, ever under construction, the abandoned train near the exit on the way to Fresno that says “State Prison / Strawberry Fields.”
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We moved here from Wisconsin when I was 8 and I think I was old enough to marvel and also to think “what the hell is this place?” I think I’ve spent a great deal of my grown life trying to decode it—the bigger it, the smaller it, the way those connect. I suppose I think a lot about how the past bleeds into the present. My parents are both historians, you know, of Asia and empire. In America on vacations they liked to take us to historic homes. I think they probably in an unexamined way liked pioneer narratives but they were also attuned to things. My mom, the scholar of Empire, was always pointing out the global aftermath. I suppose, we always live in an aftermath.
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But the question is: We live in an aftermath of what? The aftermath of what heave? Which clouds swirl above us? And which float inside us, still?
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Like so many kinds of stories, it took me a long time to learn the history of Japanese internment in my town. There it was but there was not a public language suggesting that we look. I learned it sideways, in passing from friends, till it dawned on me whole.
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Also, what goes into knowing about each other’s clouds, all the different clouds? How are they collectively ours, and how some instantiation of hard to decode private griefs? They say that trauma writes itself into the cells for generations. My other friends had grandparents who had been in concentration camps. There are many aftermaths.
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We cannot remember together without some common language.
If we cannot remember together in some common way, we blunder separately.
We lack empathy for ourselves and others.
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The part of the trip I keep remembering was the night before we arrived, as we were driving off the grid and into the desert, each of us talking on the phone, each saying goodnight gently to some partner neither of the other of us could see. You to your new love, me to my children, the night deepening as we entered the half-heard conversations of the other, sharing space. I thought about that image a lot, about what it is to listen to half a conversation, because in some ways we were headed to have half a conversation, each of us with some ghosts, and with the past. The desert was cold by then, the stars enormous.
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“I see my ghosts more clearly now” is what you told me, about retracing these paths, to this camp and to Gila River, so you could read into what had felt silent in your childhood. So you could have a conversation with people who you need answers from, who can’t any longer answer back.
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I think of the questions I want to ask my grandparents: “What was it like to live in the segregated south?” Not even sure they’d know how to language an answer. Feel certain that their life-selves would dodge me. Feel like I need to ask their ghosts anyway, clear through the pain and shame I know they felt.
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When we talk to the past, how do we expect it to answer?
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What happens when we talk to them, those ghosts? And then share them with each other, and think through the puzzle of what they leave us? Does it make the road seem less spat out? Or is it simply in the hope that our daughters and granddaughters might do the same for us, might offer this era and its madness some compassion we don’t know about yet?
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Am grateful to you for walking through the orchard of bitter pears with me.
It is late and I need to call my children. Good night dear Brynn. Let’s talk soon.
Love,
Tess