Robert Root

 

 

We live in an age when our long familiar culture is undergoing reinterpretation. Much is hopeful, as we more fully recognize our fellow citizens as equals regardless of racial and cultural differences; much is alarming, as we realize how dangerous and foolish has been our belated understanding of human communities, of the nature of other species, and of impending changes to our planet. Everywhere now, we encounter literature and media much more attuned to raising our awareness of our commonality across the world. The near universal response to the Ukrainian crisis and the Russian president's refusal to let the world keep moving forward together demonstrate the difficulty in achieving long overdue humane resolutions to such conflicts.

 

One influence prompting reinterpretation, more inadvertent than intentional, comes from reading recent multicultural literature. Not long ago I read Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, a historical novel focused on a Korean family in mid-20th century Japan, and two powerful graphic memoirs, Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's depiction of life in politically oppressive Iran, and They Called Us Enemy, George Takei's account of the confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II. For me, those books set the stage for a stronger engagement with reinterpretation when I recently read The Best We Could Do, a graphic memoir by Vietnamese author/illustrator Thi Bui. One of the strengths of the graphic memoir in recent years has been its ability to offer an almost cinematic representation of its author's history. Like those books by Satrapi and Takei, as well as Art Spiegelman's Maus and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength, The Best We Could Do manages to simulstaneously present an insightful and intelligent family memoir and a suspenseful and moving account of troubling periods of political history. It helped alter what I took for granted about the history I had lived through.

 

Bui's memoir includes a brief illustrated timeline covering Vietnamese history from the beginning of Chinese rule in 111 BC to its eventual liberation in 1975, but the graphic narrative centers on 20th Century history, covering the country's inclusion in French Indochina, the Japanese occupation in World War II, the post-war return of the French and subsequent conflict with the Communist Viet Minh, the internecine warfare between North and South Vietnam elevated by the military presence and eventual retreat of American forces, and the final liberation and unification of Vietnam. Throughout this history, generations of the Bui family continue to adjust to military events and political changes, until finally, as refugees, they make a harrowing emigration by secretly sailing to Malaysia and eventually resettling in the United States.

 

The narrative moves both forward and backward in the lives of the characters. In early chapters set in the present Bui establishes family relationships and the various tensions that make her need to explore family history back to the period of her parents' birth and upbringing. She establishes the nature of the culture in which they lived and the conflicts that affected family decisions about their own lives and their children's lives. The movement back and forth in time gets the reader close to the characters, watching them interact with each other and with the culture they inhabit, and charts the impact of historical events upon them. Thi Bui is the essential narrator of the memoir but her parents each tell their own stories, allowing us to understand central characters across generations and sense the challenges of growing up in the times and the culture they did. The immersion in their private lives keeps readers absorbed in highly dramatic and sensitively intimate moments they all experience. The memoir makes it clear that, whatever the family complications may be, the challenge of adjusting to the world outside the family is unavoidable and stressful.

 

The way we react to what we read depends upon what we bring to the reading and the degree to which the text sets off reverberations in our consciousness, whether remote or intimate. Bui's book reverberated with my memories of the eras she portrays. I was, in every way, a distanced bystander to that history, my opposition to American engagement in Vietnam irrelevant and ineffectual, my attention focused primarily on American military, on literary and cinematic dramatizations of American perspectives. Bui presented a community perspective, a citizen perspective, a family perspective, an internal depiction of people trying to get on with their lives in the midst of politically imposed chaos and destruction. I didn't see events from their perspective 50 years ago.

 

This is an age of reinterpretation and I appreciate having my perspective widened, my understanding broadened. Still a bystander, my understanding of how all our lives are universally connected has been strengthened and given greater range by reading this book. I know I still have further to go.

 

 

Note: Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2018.

 

I was either falling asleep or slowly waking up when I found myself thinking how isolated I have usually been from events that created what we call history. I was born just after American involvement in the Second World War began— my parents married on Valentine's Day 1942 and I was born nine months and two days later while my father was serving in the U. S. Marines. He was absent for the war's duration; I first met him, briefly, after I turned one, and I was three when he came home for good. The war had no other impact on me. Throughout the Korean war, I was in elementary school and, except for school air raid drills that taught us to cower in the halls or cower under our desks and glimpses of news programs my father watched or newspaper front pages I didn't read, I focused on tv westerns and superhero comic books. In the sixties I was aware of the Communist presence in Cuba and the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King and the expansion of the Vietnam War, but I was either in college, concentrating on literature and creative writing, or later teaching high school English among older teachers who were WWII vets. I was relieved to have evaded the draft and though I urged students to avoid military service, I persistently stuck to the curriculum.

 

Race issues around the country had come up one day when college classmates and I drove into Rochester to tour riot sites, but I barely interacted with any African Americans except for a few older college students. What generated headlines and televised news could have happened anywhere in the world except where I was teaching or studying. I mimicked my parents' and grandparents' values and generally disapproved of war and racism just as I disapproved of murder and rape and crime in general. I felt that by being law-abiding and generally ethical, I was sufficient in my citizenship and in my—what can I call it?—righteousness.

 

No particular political or moral motivation justified my remoteness from the world's dilemmas. I was a small town-boy interested in books and at first radio programs and then television shows and continually movies, and I was continually preoccupied with personal interests—reading voluminously, constantly writing about something or other, living inside my own head rather than venturing out much into the world or taking up causes. Only occasionally did I acknowledge having an opinion about something, one I made up on the spot if asked about it since I probably didn't already have one handy. I primarily focused on my teaching and concentrated on classroom interactions with students (though I did occasionally reveal an opposition to the Vietnam conflict). I had a few friends for awhile, once in a while, people much like me—academic, aesthetic, personally responsible, though probably less self-absorbed. I mostly concentrated on the work I did professionally or the creative projects that preoccupied me—that is, when I worked professionally or was creatively preoccupied.

 

At the moment, I'm aware of how much the pandemic life I've been living is like my adolescent life and the habitual tendency toward self-isolation that followed it. And yet the world seems now more present in my life than it would have been decades ago. We can't seem to avoid encountering the most persistently intrusive elements of the times we live in. The library where I write has strict regulations about face masks and nobody enters without one. That's also true of the people delivering curbside orders to my open car trunk. For two years now I've parked weekly in the exact same spots in those stores' parking lots. Most of my communication with family and friends has been through the internet: online mail, online conversations, Facetime chatting, Zoom calls. It seems now as if my sense of isolation is less something I thoughtlessly accepted in myself and more something being imposed on me, on us, on everyone I know, something we can't avoid and are constantly being reminded of.

 

And then there's Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the almost universal disapproval of it, the Ukrainian flag posted everywhere, Ukraine's president's eloquent address to the world, the threat of nuclear war, as if the last two years hadn't had enough deaths across the planet. Now my grandchildren may be living through a time more fearsome and more ominously present on a wider scale than I was present for decades ago, when I was at their ages, during the last World War and through continual Asian "conflicts." It is less likely that they'll be able to ignore or overlook the current war as it escalates—less likely that they'll develop a sense of isolation from the events decimating the world.

 

 

 

Journal Entry February 27, 2022: The oddness of our existence continues. Last week, because of scheduled school cancellation early in the week, Sue taught in person only one day, on Thursday, instead of twice. This week, because of a fierce ice storm, her Tuesday in-person teaching was called off again. Luckily, we learned of it a dozen minutes into our commute, in time to head safely back home before traffic got heavy. She'd again tutor in-person only on Thursday. Yesterday, at sunrise, the sun shown directly into our study window for the first time this year, a sure sign that we are headed for spring, and today we woke early to the sound of plows attacking the five or six inches of snow that fell overnight.

 

On those in-person teaching days in the past, I'd drop Sue off at the school and head for a coffee shop to while away the time before the local library opened. In this fiercer pandemic time, I avoid the coffee shop and visit our daughter's home for an hour or two. Often our daughter has already gone to work and her husband takes the kids off to school and then goes into his office. Yesterday, when I sat down on a couch near windows overlooking their back yard, I opened my briefcase and realized I'd forgotten to pack my laptop. The cord was there and a yellow pad and a small empty notebook and my journal, some pens, a second pair of eyeglasses, but no computer. The radio was on, and I sat there listening for at least an hour and a half to NPR reports about Russia's invasion of Ukraine and commentator speculation about the consequences. Then I packed up and went to the library.

 

After two years of pandemic, accelerated climate change, the threat of Republicans returning to power, and dangerously repressive Supreme Court decisions, a major war suggested the nearness of an apocalypse that we don't want to believe in. So, I am content to be in a very quiet space in the library, with only hints of snow flurries beyond the windows to connect me to the outside world. It was good to get away from hearing reports about yet another world crisis, but then I remembered a blog draft I started about how out of touch with the world I have been throughout my life.

 

That draft was on my laptop. My laptop was probably at home on my desk. Its cord was in my workbag on the library table. I could've driven back to Waukesha to fetch it but decided not to, though I wouldn't pick up Sue for another five hours—I drop her off at 7:00, pick her up at 2:30 or 3:00. In total that's an eight-hour day, six of them for me in the library. I looked at my cellphone to make sure I had no email I had to take personally—I didn't; I usually don't—but then turned it off to save the battery so we could contact each other later.

 

That meant I'd have no touch with my Facebook page or CNN, NPR, or BBC news or any of the links to the outside world my laptop usually provides. I'd see no ads, no commercials, no images of people's cats or dogs or backyard birds, no updated profile pictures or selfies, no shared articles or blog posts on political or cultural matters, no videos of gymnastic events or Olympic events or excerpts from ballets or operas or Broadway musicals or dramas or comedy skits, no beloved or respected quotes from literary works or psychological advice columns or philosophical pronouncements or health reports, no invitations to join or donate or celebrate, no chances to send birthday greetings or family loss commiserations or acknowledgements of all kinds of anniversaries, no notices of spam mail or blocked efforts to hack my computer. (There's no one near me in the library—no likelihood of my journal, in which I'm composing this, being hacked.)

 

It also meant I couldn't review any log entries or journal entries or rough drafts I composed on my computer. I could only review handwritten entries in my journal. What I wrote last time, on February 8, interested me but I wasn't sure it provoked anything on my laptop or not. I wondered if I should print everything I compose on the computer but then, I couldn't trust myself to bring a mass of printouts—or at least certain pertinent ones—with me when I left the house on a day like today.

 

So, this all brings me around to a persistent question that seems to arise with increasing frequency. What do you do when you have nothing to do other than write about having nothing to do?

 

 

I've been to Alaska only once, in 2009, to teach and read at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference. My friend Mike Steinberg had taught there the previous year and I was invited on his recommendation. The conference was held at the Land's End Resort, at the tip of a narrow spit of land extending out from Homer, a small city on Kachemak Bay opposite a longer arm of the Kenai Peninsula. To prepare for the conference I read books by other presenters, especially those essayists and memoirists who lived and wrote in Alaska: Marybeth Holleman, Nancy Lord, Peggy Shumaker, Miranda Weiss, Sherry Simpson, and the poet Eva Saulitis. I was eager to hear them read at the conference, eventually acquired some of their subsequent books, and was saddened to later learn of Eva's and Sherry's deaths.

 

Sue came with me to Kachemak Bay and our son Tom flew up from LA to wander some of Alaska with us for a few days. We visited Anchorage and locations on the Kenai Peninsula and, perhaps most memorably, toured Harriman Fiord on a vessel that took us close to a glacier that sheared tremendous sheets of ice into the water. I had wanted to see the glacier because, prior to the trip, I'd read both John Muir's Travels in Alaska and another book about Muir's experiences with naturalist John Burroughs on the 1899 Harriman expedition, gathering material as if I might write a book about John o' Mountains and John o' Birds. (I didn't, but I still have folders full of notes and printouts.) We three then returned to our homes in California and Wisconsin and I didn't keep in touch with many of those Alaskan writers for long, except for one.

 

Bill Sherwonit, a journalist and outdoor essayist, shared his experiences in the wild reaches of Denali National Park and what he terms Anchorage's "backyard wilderness," Chugach State Park. He'd written To the Top of Denali: Climbing Adventures on North America's Highest Peak (it's 20,310 ft high), and I knew I wouldn't emulate him there, but his later books, Living with Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey and Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska's Arctic Wilderness, gave me a somewhat less intrepid model for the kind of nonfiction of place I wanted to write. We talked some at the conference, and in later years I linked up with his writing on Facebook. "City Wilds," his column for the Anchorage Press Sports and Outdoors section, is accessible online and its subjects are wide-ranging, including remembrances of poet Robert Bly and Anchorage birder Dave DeLap; considerations of ravens, Bohemian waxwings, snowshoe hares, snow spiders, hiking in the Chugach Front Range; a celebration of the black-capped chickadee; a call for a "healthier relationship with our home planet, the wild earth"; a celebration of the "wondrous wild."

 

These memories of Kachemak Bay and Alaskan nonfiction were triggered by reading Bill Sherwonit's recent column taking "a brief look back at 40 years of writing in Alaska." It provides an overview of his writing life since he left southern California in February 1982 and anchored himself in the north. He mentions coming "to identify [him]self as a 'nature writer'." I especially appreciated his perspective on what being a writer has meant to him. He writes that whenever he's asked when he'll retire, he responds, "A writer never retires," yet acknowledges to himself that he doesn't "devote the time and energy to writing that [he] once did," spending more time now "in the close company of nature." He adds that "writing for me has long been more than a job or career, and something closer to a way a life, a way of being in the world." Those comments are the ones that I related to the most in that particular column.

 

Last week, when I finally opened the log I keep to record thoughts about this blog, I pondered some reasons for taking time off for so long but also found myself imagining topics that might prompt more new entries in the coming months. Every so often I seem to need to be reminded that writers usually keep on writing even when there's no likelihood of—or any particular interest in—publication. Writing does something for them that they need to let it do. It's a psychological necessity, perhaps even a spiritual one. It helps them come to terms with themselves—to know who they are and where they are and why they need to be there. They don't always remember those things—I haven't lately. The next time I read Bill Sherwonit's "City Wilds" column, I hope it will remind me of them and I will be able to reassure myself that I am still writing.

 

 

Notes: Bill Sherwonit. "City Wilds: A brief look back at 40 years of writing in Alaska," Anchorage Press. (February 9, 2022). [If you scroll below this particular column, you'll find other "City Wilds" entries.]