My hate story

Recently I was talking about the main duties of the student archives technician at the National Archives, and it lead me into a tangent about perceptions of archives and the public’s idea that digitization is some panacea for records management, and an easy fix.

What I didn’t get to are my other duties at work. Besides holdings maintenance projects (the ones that started the tangent on the sheer number of materials we have), I also work in the public areas, assisting the public and researchers, and complete research requests for patrons who are off-site but need help. The first of these assignments takes up half of every workday, as it is the job of the students to assist the public so that the full-time archivists can get down to doing the projects and work they are here to do. Not that their duties don’t also revolve around aiding researchers and the public, but if someone has to sit in the textual research room while a researcher is here and she must not leave the room, well, that limits the amount of other activities that she can complete while essentially on lock-down. In this case, right now, I am in the text room supervising a researcher for the Corps of Engineers, and so I cannot leave the room; it allows for time to write journals reflecting on my duties here, for instance. Sometimes, if the timing is right, we can bring a project into the text room and work on it while we’re trapped in here.

The other room is the research room, and that’s the general public area, the one where you do not need a researcher card to enter, and pretty much anyone who can get past the security guards and metal detectors is allowed in there. It means we are safe from criminals, but we are not safe from idiots and crazy people, and we are especially not safe from… genealogists. I am not the first person to write (no, complain) about genealogists as the annoying part of the duties of a student employee here at the Archives.

Perley Grubb's WWI draft card

The problem is, most people’s families did really nothing much that would put them anywhere in the historical records. We have federal records here, and most people go their whole lives never really being really involved in federal functions. You fill out your census every ten years—that’s the main thing. Some people have military records—that’s another biggie. And if your ancestors immigrated or filed for a passport, they would also have filed federal records. But even then, in the case of immigration, they would have had to file their petition for naturalization in a federal court, and before 1907, it wasn’t required that they file them in federal court. So anyone who came to the United States in the nineteenth century could file in any level of court—county, state, federal, random Podunk local courthouse. And that’s if they naturalized at all; they might have remained nationals of their birth country.

We have research tools here for people to begin to find records their ancestors more commonly filed—vital records of birth, marriage, and death. Those are records filed with the state, and so are most often held by either the state’s historical archives or the vital records office—depending on how old they are and varying widely by state. People often get frustrated that before the twentieth century (and even in that one, in many cases) births were not recorded officially. If their great-grandfather’s birth was recorded on the inside of some Bible somewhere, I can’t help them.

Siu Quon Woo, naturalization photos, from one of my favorite reference requests

It’s not to say that I wholly dismiss genealogy. I understand regular people’s need to see themselves in the past in order to make it meaningful for them. Genealogy is a significant historical experience for many people in today’s digitization-happy world. Part of public history is finding a way to make the past matter to an individual; this means including genealogy on the totem pole, for what value it does offer to a public craving connection. Historians whose focuses lie in larger themes, events, historical trends, and connections—oftentimes professional historians and scholars—don’t focus on minutiae of particular individuals unless they did do something significant or relevant to the subject of their study. Whereas genealogists go looking for a particular person to see if he might have done anything worth recording, historians find the things that were worth recording and then find out more about the people who did them. They start from different points, and work in opposite directions.

I understand though, that a large portion of the public we serve is here to do just that, to find their family. So I work in the research room, patiently helping octogenarians use the printers and computers, and try my best to let them do their own research even when it means teaching them how to move backward and forward on an internet page. (Yes, really.) We don’t do the research for them, we give them tools, indexes, direction on where to begin and what kinds of records will serve their needs best, and then we let them loose.

One of my favorite photos, by Dorthea Lange, of a breadline in the 1930s. Real history goes much deeper for me.

The most frustrating thing about working with genealogists is when they get angry, upset, or even cry over not being able to find much about those farther back in their family tree. I had one lady in tears at 4:45 one afternoon, because an ancestor she had been researching twenty-five years was still eluding her. He was drafted from Michigan into the Union army during the Civil War, and then she knew that the family received record that he died. She was distraught that there was no record of anything in between. Ma’am, I wanted to say, what the heck else would he have filed with anyone? He was at war. Unless he wrote some diary that somehow made it back into the arms of his family after the war, which is highly, crazily doubtful, there would be nothing else. He fought in a war and he died. That corner of the tree is complete. I am sorry if that is unsatisfying. In my experience, genealogy is highly unsatisfying, because it is so unlikely that your ancestors left much of a paper trail.

We make more of a paper trail these days, but it’s technically an electronic trail. Maybe in one hundred years, my Amazon Wishlist will provide a descendent of mine with endless insight into what I was like. They will also be able to read my Twitter feed, which I do think is very interesting to ponder. I so wish I could read the Twitter feed of Young John Allen, or those sent among the members of a nineteenth century quilting group. But until some of those things become “history,” for now we have the United States census, where you can see interesting things like whether or not your ancestors spoke English and were or were not the head of the household. (Am I coming across here as scathingly sarcastic? I do hope so.)

The other part of my time is split between several tasks. One, which has pretty much been on the back burner since December, is a holdings maintenance project, as everyone who works here is assigned at least one of these, so that downtime that might crop up can be used for maintenance, organization, description, and database creation for and about the many, many collections and materials we have here. Over time, we are entering information about the items in collections and folders into a finding aid, as well as creating a database that helps archivists and researchers alike to navigate each particular collection. There are so many records here at the National Archives that I know we could all do this for the rest of our lives and not complete the task.

I often walk in the bays—which is what you call the giant warehouse-style caverns that hold the endless shelves stacked with FRC boxes, Hollinger boxes, abnormal-sized boxes, cylinders, map cabinets, and marvel at the sheer amount of material they hold. There are four bays total at the Atlanta facility. I cannot even estimate any remotely meaningful number of cubic feet or number of boxes—let alone estimate a number of documents within those. Billions. Kajillions. I laughed at a recent series of online articles and commentaries that were addressing the recent Civil Case Screening Project that NARA has undertaken in the last year (I’ll explain soon), in which people objected to the National Archives deciding which records in the enormous backlog of civil cases would be kept, and which would be destroyed. People have been upset for a number of reasons, some founded, most unfounded or unrealistic. My favorite innocent comment came from a woman who perkily suggested these records all be digitized instead, since one of the arguments for destroying a portion of them was due to space constraints within NARA facilities. She proposed digitization as if that was the simpler, easier answer. Clearly this woman has neither spent much time digitizing anything (it is ENORMOUSLY time-consuming and painfully monotonous) nor, obviously, has she ever taken a peek at the cavernous bays I walk through every day I am at work. I think it would be a healthy dose of medicine for each patron, every American citizen who gets angry at the federal government for not being able to locate a record they are seeking by searching for someone’s name, to take a look inside the bays of the Archives for a glimpse at how many things we keep here. Records are not organized by a handy name reference, no. And they never will be if you understand anything about federal records. Nor, also, will they all be digitized. Not ever.

YOU want to digitize all those records?

Last January, I was struck with an idea for a project. I had read a book about a generation of Chinese girls who had been adopted into families worldwide, with a huge number of them becoming part of American families. (I wrote about it too.) Tens of thousands of these girls are growing up Chinese-American, in predominantly upper-middle class families, and they have a distinct perspective on the world, and their spot in it.

That Americans have been adopting from Asia is not new information to most people; American families with an adopted Chinese (or more generally Asian–Korean, Vietnamese) child is more and more common in the general public. On the sitcom Modern Family, Cam and Mitchell adopted their daughter Lily from Vietnam, and that diversity is one of the mainstays of the “modern” aspect of the family composition on the show. In your own community, at the grocery store or Target, multicultural families are an ever more common site within the larger populace.

Girls practice Chinese dance on rainy Saturday afternoon in February.

What I realized–in one of those sudden ideas that come to mind only when a combination of other triggers intersect perfectly–is that there is an important historical story here, and that I could help to tell it, begin to collect it, with the tools I have. I had been thinking a lot about identity, and the concept of “roots,” genealogy, and biology, and thinking about how much, how deeply, it doesn’t matter in the end. I had been thinking a lot about how much I want to adopt in my own life. And I had been thinking about the group of people–oftentimes members of Families with Children from China (FCC)–who is here, connected, who live this story every day: the families. Also being a public radio addict, I love podcasts and the new media we have to share stories and collect and share history, and decided the internet combined with an audio format would be the perfect way to tell this story.

Over the course of a few months in early 2011, I wielded in and narrowed my enormous original scope, and decided on what would become the final capstone project for my master’s in public history.

I would collect oral histories of families who had adopted children from China (mostly girls, but a few boys as well), who live in the Metro Atlanta area. They will be delivered in an online format, much like a podcast, and often in small series that connect the stories of various families to each other.

I wrote a paper to end the semester, with grand ideas, plans, and notions of this project.
Then in the fall, I had to begin to deliver on my many (many) promises. An important thing to point out is that I knew not one singular person in the Atlanta community who had adopted a child from China. I am not in the age demographic of adoptive parents, and I am not even married. Nor do I have kids. I spend a lot of my time at work and at school. So I started cold-calling people, with a very strange request, indeed, when they did call me back or answer my unknown number: “Yes, hi, I am a graduate student at Georgia State, and I am working on a project about families who have adopted children from China. If you are interested, could I explain a little bit about what I am doing?”

Strangely, I only felt really nervous the very first time I did a dialing session. That first, painful, jump into the icy water. Turns out, the water was not cold at all. A few returned my calls or answered, and connected me with people who were either more directly involved, or spoke to me themselves. In each case that I have spoken with a mom, dad, or family as a group, I have been allowed a little more access into their lives, and they have shared my project with their friends, people also connected through FCC–the Atlanta chapter and beyond. It has been extraordinary.

What began as a few contacts in the fall has snowballed in 2012. I have been graciously welcomed into homes, invited to hear personal tales of how these families became what they are–decisions about family, ethnicity, fertility, biological children, and all other manner of real, complex lives.

I ate Chinese food to celebrate Chinese New Year with one very active playgroup, the kids averaging about six to ten years old, and it was a rowdy, wonderful evening, meeting parents and further discussing and explaining this project and my goals.

I watched a rehearsal performance of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company, which has become a haven and passion for a number of adopted Chinese girls over the years, many of whom continue to dance into high school and college.

I was invited to a monthly book club begun by mothers of adopted Chinese girls and boys, who found there was a need to read the literature (spanning many topics) on kids, adoption, China, parenting, and a number of issues within these topics, and that reading them together was more meaningful. I have begun attending them, and the most striking note I took away from my first session was that there are issues of confidence, perception from outsiders, and even simple semantics that arise in every adoptive mothers’ mind, and that the support from small groups like this one is indispensable for these women. It was so lovely to sit and discuss their most recent selection, Lucky Girl, with them–quite frankly, most I did was listen.

I listened to one mother console another on the fear that she, who had never had children biologically, somehow loved her daughter in a less, or different, way than the mother who had two biological boys before adopting her Chinese daughter. This second mother listened earnestly, and then vehemently countered that, having both, she promises there is not one thing different in the love for each of her three children, biological or adopted. She repeats this for emphasis, staring her friend straight in the eye. She is brought to tears when talking about it further.

It is moving. There are many times I am near tears in working on this project. The stories, the love, the shared experiences are so moving. I am up to my ears in adoption stories, and pictures of young, growing, and grown-up families; it only makes my conviction and desire to adopt stronger, if that was possible.

I was invited by two girls, ages 8 and 9, to watch the videos their older sister (film-producer earning her master’s at Columbia, might I add) made of their respective adoptions, after I had finished interviewing their parents. It was the first time in the course of this work that I watched, in moving picture, the moment when a little two-year-old met her parents and sisters. It was remarkable, joyous, and scary, and sad all at once–many in that room captured on film feeling so many varieties of emotions all at once. It is a moment not everyone would perhaps want to share with me; I was honored, yet again, by their gracious invitation into the lives of others.

Is it that adoptive families tend to be willing to share, because they are used to being the ones in the room who created their family in a manner somewhat different from “normal”? I don’t know the reasons, but I am grateful for their positive responses to this project, the excitement some have expressed, and the thanks others have shared. We all recognize that these are stories worth telling, collecting, connecting, sharing. I think they are especially rich in the aural format, voices captured in this moment in the lives of these families. The little girls, little boys, teenagers I have spoken to–those voices are being saved, and their notions of themselves are now recorded, as documentation that this is how they felt in 2012, about their spot in this wide world. I giggle, I cry, I am in awe as I listen back to the words and thoughts that I have collected. How far I have brought this, into fruition, into something quite extraordinary–something I wanted but that, if I’m being honest, seemed impossibly large to attempt.

I have been invited into homes, back into homes, met kids, siblings, parents, friends, interviewed many of them. I’ve met with people without the voice recorder on as many occasions, listening and talking and proving that I can be trusted with their family’s history.

I was most recently offered two beautiful, hardcover books that have been compiled from families’ personal photographs ad writings, on the China adoption experience. The collection is from photo collections and families across the United States, who all have this same experience in common. The first of the books was compiled and designed in the basement of the family I most recently interviewed, and they insisted they had “too many copies” lying around, so gave me one of each of these two books. They are cherished additions to the resources I have already compiled as I entered this world to begin work on this project. From one, I found the inspiration to finally settle on a title:

A Thousand Ways Richer:

The China adoption experience in Atlanta, An Oral History

I have been shown unbelievable support, consideration, and openness as I have thus far explored the China adoption community in Atlanta. The most striking discovery has been confirmed and reaffirmed by nearly every mother or father I speak to: the adoption of their daughter, son, or multiple children has brought them more than just a child–their lives have been enriched in a thousand ways they could not have imagined before. A child, yes. Also, culture, dance, food, language, history. Also, activity, sports, small businesses, and an entire community of support, best friends, love, play groups. Some who share this initial experience go on to become lifelong friends. One man’s Chinese daughter has already made him reconsider his perception on race, and interracial marriage–and she’s only eight.

I will explore many of these facets in the forthcoming website, where I post the stories and some of the audio. But the quick thesis to this thing, what has inspired the title, is a combination of the thousands of ways life is changed by adoption, and the countless ways I am also richer for knowing these incredible women, men, daughters, and sons. The ways my life has been enriched are too numerous to count, and I would have missed every single one of them if I had shied away from doing this, in favor of something easier, smaller, with people I already knew. It has been exhilarating to know what I am capable of, if I just pick up the phone and ask.

This corner is for quilt panels that have not yet been combined with others to make the enormous quilt squares (composed of eight panels, each of which is 3 feet by 6 feet). The squares are about as tall, when complete, as the height of two tall adults. They also have posters, photographs, exhibition panels, and other wonderful memorabilia of the Quilt’s many displays and journeys over the years, since 1987.

The collection of fire-proof filing cabinets forms the archives of the NAMES Project, as these contain the paperwork, letters, and any other items that family members, friends, and lovers have sent in along with their quilt panels over the years. I would love to work on the collection. Love.

You can also see the collection of vintage sewing machines that have been given to the woman who designs, compiles, and sews all of the panels into larger squares (I can’t remember her name at the moment). She has been with the Quilt since its inception–25 years now. Those tables are the exact size of the panel measurements, for ease in combining and working on them.

This one is blurry, unfortunately, but there is the main hall back into the shelves where the Quilt is stored. Squares are stacked and folded (by the way, not the best preservation technique) so that all 50,000+ can fit in this fairly limited warehouse space. A log is kept indicating when a square has been “checked out” of its place on the shelves, or when it is sent off as part of a display or exhibition. I can’t believe that what stretches for acres and acres when it is unfurled is all being stored down these modest aisles.

That’s us. I am also regularly floored when I think my image and our family’s words to Craig and his mom and sister have been in this collection for more than a decade already.  Our small, meaningful contribution to this important memorial is stored and shared along with the countless–millions–of other stories, memories, prayers, and words shared over the years.

The statement below our pictures reads:

Thank you Craig, Sharon, and Kim for your real-life lessons in courage, strength and family love. Our kids witnessed understanding and deep compassion through our friendship – a valuable lesson for life, for all.

]]> http://betheink.com/2012/01/where-the-quilt-is-kept/feed/ 0 http://betheink.com/2011/12/in-small-things-forgotten/ http://betheink.com/2011/12/in-small-things-forgotten/#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:06:56 +0000 Jcedens http://betheink.com/?p=1645

It is a marvelous fact about human history that, in fact, most of what we leave behind for others to study us by are the things we don’t think much about–the simplest, everyday items. It’s no haphazard thing that much of pre-history is studied through those ubiquitous pottery shards archeologists seem always to be brandishing around (figuratively, and in their arguments; they would never actually brandish them around, old and historically valuable as they surely are). I find archeology to be exceedingly not interesting. However, I can appreciate–and I do–the value of tracing the lifestyles, customs, patterns, and culture through what little remains of earlier humankind, and give great credit to the patient practitioner who can see small and sweeping patterns in the study of layers of dirt, types of pottery, locations of the trash receptacles on the sites of previous civilizations.

Those are valuable patterns to see. It’s like in high school when the teacher asks you to analyze this piece of a Shakespeare play for homework, and you go home and toil and come in the next day to find not only did you not get out of it what the teacher did, but all your classmates seem to be the same page as well (and not your same page). This is how I felt throughout the whole year of British lit, which meant so many Shakespearean plays to analyze, and this is how I felt when reading James Deetz and Henry Glassie, scholars of early material culture, in my own material culture class this year. The professor had us drawing conclusions, and there were patterns I simply did not see, while others in the class were far better at drawing them out of the readings.

(I am OK with being unable to do these types of analyses. I have always felt that I work hard, which makes up for a natural lack of inherent understanding of things, or a natural skill for learning. I don’t hear something once and always remember it [in fact I rarely do remember it]. I am particularly bad at naturally knowing how words are pronounced. I can use them in writing, understand perfectly what they mean, and God help me, hope that I don’t have to say them out loud. But, I digress.)

Illustrations of headstones by James Deetz, from his book

The thing about reading Deetz’s book, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archeology of Early American Life, is that you come to realize that the strongest arguments for drawing historical conclusions, and for seeing patterns, lies in the very things we do not think matter in this life. Including, yes, the very things we deem the least important: the things we throw away. Early Americans are largely judged–centuries later–on those things they hoped would go away, the very things they chose not to keep. Writes Deetz:

The disposal of refuse is one of our most unconscious acts: while we might expect some hidden motive in the way a court clerk recorded the disposition of a case or a diarist described his neighbors, it is most unlikely that in removing food remains, broken dishes, and other debris from a household, people were making any conscious statement about themselves or others. Yet, in the changing nature of trash disposal since the seventeenth century, our ancestors have once again informed us of the way in which their view of the world was changing. (171-172)

He goes on to explain that from the seventeenth century until around 1750, refuse appears in irregular, shallow pits sprinkled in a circle around the basic structure that would have been the homestead itself. After 1750, in place of these shallow pits, would appear one deep pit. Two things can be concluded from this change; one, that this shift correlates with changing population increase and concentration–meaning trash all around would be more of a nuisance. And two, that “such precise and neat handling of one of life’s less useful and valuable things suggests almost a compulsion to order.” After all, the eighteenth was the era of order and reform in many areas of life.

I love these mussel "drags," in the Shaping Traditions folk culture exhibit at the Atlanta History Center, that show how those tiny little buttons, important pieces of our lives that float around often without our notice, are made.

This exhibit is so exciting, because those items are being featured exactly where they belong, among innovations that hav made our lives easier, given us vast improvements and allowed for the conveniences we live with each day. This would have been an incredible exhibit to help curate, and I wonder how each thing made the final list over other things. Each object appears alongside original sketches and drawings by their inventors, patent specifications, and original advertisements for the items. The full list of items in the exhibit is worth pondering. Think about how each of these things affects your life, some more than others:

I love picturing each of these things, one at a time, and their places in my life. The little things have a far greater impact on the study of material culture, on the makeup of civilizations, than the big-ticket items we covet, keep, and cherish.

The full story–audio and transcript–including some background of the items chosen, is on NPR/PRI’s The World site. Also check out a video and more information on the Hidden Heroes exhibit from the London Science Museum.

I want to remember this class forever. It was inspirational to listen to my classmates over the semester, to hear their tales from the field as we each figured out what the heck our projects would be about and how we were going to master (as much as possible) the art of the interview that yields vivid and meaningful stories out of narrators–those we interview–and then compose those somehow into an appropriate historical synthesis.

Not every college class is composed of such a diverse, engaged, and interesting crowd–not even in grad school. We had some of the best discussions in that class that I’ve had in my entire college career (of six years…). Today my friend Seth (an undergrad–the class is cross-listed) remarked that this was his favorite class in all of college.

I am under no illusions that anyone else will care to read about what each of my classmates did for their projects, but I need to write them down so that in a few years I won’t have forgotten this extraordinary body of work that we produced this fall, in a matter of weeks and months, in this year 2011. Listening to the clips in class, of the people we’d been hearing about all semester made for a remarkable week of class presentations. Also stellar to hear about the dirty details of trying to get people (sometimes relatives, sometimes strangers, some in between these) to talk to us, college kids out seeking a good story to contribute to historical narrative.

Jessie: I interviewed two women who are the mothers of girls adopted from China. I explored the notions of family, roots, identity, cross-cultural families, siblings, and the trials of the adoptions process–including public and private perception from family members, friends, and outsiders. I had wonderful experiences and learned so much. I will chronicle some of my own stories and lessons here soon. I will also share some of the most remarkable clips, details, and stories in audio form, so you can hear these women tell their own stories.

Chris: He interviewed three immigrant rights activists (one of them his wife) who had some live-defining experiences during the immigration drama that occurred in Arizona in 2009 and 2010, with SB 1070. Young people, a recent event, and powerful, emotional stories.

Aaron: Interviewed a WWII veteran who hadn’t planned on joining the military, but was drafted in the last month of the war. He wound up being a career soldier, the war truly changing the course of his entire life. He found this guy through another girl in the class, actually, after expressing his interest in doing something relating to WWII. This was an unexpectedly interesting story, because really, what new stories can you tell these days on the second world war?

Joleen: She focused on one elementary school in a county south of Atlanta, and sought the perspectives of teachers at the school who have seen the demographics of the school diversify enormously over the past ten years.

Liz: She delved into some perspectives of residents of her home county on what is considered the last lynching ever to occur in the South, in the 1950s, which happened in that county.

Denise: She interviewed four women who were leaders in the Georgia quilt documentation project that took place from 1989 to 1993 across the state. Her larger goal was to use these interviews to help her design her own documentation project to be expanded for her capstone project for the heritage preservation program (the same program I’m in). She wound up finding some heartfelt stories beyond the cut-and-dry facts of the documentation process itself.

Brooks: He interviewed his grandfather–from Savannah–about his career as a Georgia state legislator during the 1960s. He was elected in 1966, precisely because of the ending of the County Unit System, a unique and stunning old Georgia political structure that ensured that real political power remained with the rural parts of the state, even as larger and larger portions of the population resided in cities.

James: Interviewed three people who know or used to know the author Alice Walker, who is from Eatonton, Georgia–two classmates and her niece. He sought to define the person that is Alice Walker from a number of angles.

Michelle: She focused on her grandmother, a retired educator of more than 35 years, who was a black teacher at risk of losing her job when integration meant fewer teachers were needed.

Classmate X (Can you believe there is one girl whose name I don’t know?): Another school integration story, this time focused on people who went through the Marietta City school system during desegregation and who now teach in the same system. This was my least favorite of them all, just really oft-heard stuff, and I swear it is not because I have somehow predisposed to not like it just because I also cannot recall her name.

Danny: Interviewed three generations of his wife’s family, who own a farm in Yatesville, Georgia (population under 400), on the trials, memories, and questionable and perceived dark future of the farm and farming at large in the state and the United States.

Seth: He interviewed a personal hero and former boss, Anita Beatty, controversial advocate for the homeless and leader of the Atlanta Task Force–on which Seth spent four or five years working towards improving the lives of homeless in the city. He battled with the process, seeking the complicated private view of Anita, rather than the oft-seen and politicized public version she has so perfectly mastered.

Rosemary: Interviewed members of two families that have connection to the land that is now Arabia Mountain Heritage Area, people who were coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s, when the outskirts of the city were becoming part of the burgeoning metropolitan area.

Rebecca: Interviewed her grandmother, matriarch to her enormous North Carolina family, and strong woman head of household who ran a farm and raised dozens of children of the family over the years. Her grandmother is a pistol, for sure.

Laura: Took a journey into the histories of Commercial High School, Girls’ High, and the numerous incarnations the buildings have been since the early twentieth century. Her aunt was a student in Commercial High School, which sparked her interest, among other things–including her decades of work herself in education and as a school principal.

Last and most amazing:

Brenda: Since Brenda is a stage actor and filmmaker by training and profession as well, she used the oral history class for her own skilled perspective, and her final project reflected a creative and talented woman and a powerful story. She used clips of two women, her mother and another old friend, who are both–in different ways–part of a group of Hawaiian immigrants in the Augusta, Georgia and Aiken, South Carolina areas (through their husbands). Her own mother married a Japanese Hawaiian man, and the other woman, Millie, is Hawaiian and married a white man. Their quite distinct perspectives, when played side by side like conversation, brought out the similarities and the “Hawaiian Spirit” and tides of life that both have experienced, with Hawaiian cultural influences and as women in interracial marriages who moved to the South at a time when there were barely any people other than black and white. She made these into a film using footage of herself playing ukulele and photos of the people being mentioned and speaking. It was an apt use of her audio, fitting her own quirky style; and the story came across so powerful in this medium. Her 4-minute piece was inspiring. I was crying at her skills, at the power of these voices, at the potential we each have in us to tell a great story.

Laura also had some excellent summative comments on oral history, when she presented her process and conclusion. One is that humility, and in this, not always knowing what your goal is, can sometimes make for the most effective oral history interviews, because you are truly allowing the narrator to guide the meaning, and where it goes. You, the interviewer, are not trying to make them fit in some construct to fit your own assumptions or research goals.

Indeed, we all learned from our projects that we cannot assume to find anything, and we cannot expect to be able to form the project, the stories, into something we either anticipate or desire. We cannot possibly know the stories in store for us when that recorder starts rolling. I did other oral histories this semester for another class’s research, and so I was doing quite a few of these meetings, every one of them with someone I had either just met or had never met at all. Driving to each one, I felt that jolt, the excitement of not knowing what in the world I would learn in the next ninety minutes.

Who knows, anyone, until we ask to hear?

“There’s always been a tendency to see a place like China in very political terms. I think this is partly because it’s a communist country, it’s run by the Communist Party. And from my perspective, living in China, starting especially the way that I started, as a Peace Corps volunteer, in a small community, teaching in a small college, it gave me a very different starting point. And I really wanted to write about ordinary people in China. I didn’t want to start with an issue, or start with a political idea, I wanted to start with an individual, start with a community.”

Peter Hessler on the job as a journalist in China

Hessler is a journalist, that is an important distinction; but he writes based in a historical context, referencing the past at each step, and this is also valuable. (I will fight with people who dismiss great books written by journalists.)

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the titular "last emperor," in a complicated era in Indian and British history

I am always reminded of British writer and historian William Dalrymple’s  fantastic skill for emphasizing the individual’s experience of history, as he does in The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857,  which keeps the reader vividly engaged by showing us the Indian Rebellion of 1857 through the eyes of several key player on the ground. I have never read a book of history in which I felt so deeply connected to the characters of the era, and when they all begin falling at the hands of their enemies, I had a true emotional reaction to the destruction of this city and these lives. I’ve heard he does the same thing in one of his other works, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India.  An inspiring example–though not without his critiques–of this kind of engaging historical writing.

I’ve begun the process of cold-calling a list of strangers, to me, nothing more than a series of names and phone numbers that I found on a national organization’s Atlanta chapter site. And to them, I am a stranger asking to be let into their lives, who is asking to hear their stories, often quite personal and emotional. I am asking, after all, about the process of adopting their own children. This is a very strange thing to explain in a message on an answering machine to a person you’ve never spoken to.

And in several cases, I’ve had kids answer the phone, and take the message. This is even stranger, having to summarize in a brief sentence or series of key words to a child or teenager why this random graduate student wants to talk to their mother. (Note: It’s about them. Talk about awkward to explain.) “My name is Jessie, I’m a graduated student at Georgia State, and I want to talk to your mom about an oral history project I am starting, on families who’ve adopted children from China.” Hmm, random, indeed.

The first time I dialed a number, I was so thankful it was no longer in service, because I slammed the phone down and felt my heart rate come back down from through-the-roof heights. A few deep breaths, and onto name #2 on the list. Many calls later, I am slowly but surely reaching out to some families. All in its own time, I am in no hurry, and want these families to feel they can respond to my request in time. We’re all busy people.

At the risk of seeming creepy, I do take pictures of adorable children when visiting foreign countries. China is no exception. (Luoyuang, China, May 2007)

This is, by the way, preliminary work for what will be my master’s capstone project: an oral history series and podcast series, compiled and stored on a website that also allows for interaction and visitor submissions, on the stories and histories of Metro Atlanta families who have adopted daughters from China. This enormous diaspora of Chinese girls has spread far across the world, and Atlanta is just one corner of that vast space. This community, the girls and their adoptive (and biological) families, are part of an important historical event, beginning largely in the early 1990s and reaching a peak around 1999 – 2005, and waning in recent years as the process has become extremely cumbersome and slow for adoptive families. This twenty-odd-year period marks an important occurrence in China-U.S. relations that reaches directly into the homes of American families whose families have changed forever because of it; and I want to study this in that historical context, by compiling the oral histories of those living it.

To do this, I’ve had to muster up some courage I haven’t used since my days in student journalism–when it was nothing to phone a stranger and ask them some questions.

Hula-hoop skills at Best International, a bilingual elementary school

But oral histories are by nature very intense, quite distinct from a journalistic effort. And it has been thrilling so far, to find what’s at the other end of the line, when you call someone out of the blue–a total stranger–and ask them about something like the experience of adopting their own child.

Exhilaration even more enormous than calling as a journalist. No, I’m not a reporter, I’m a historian, and I want to record your oral history. Just as we have talked about in class, people immediately begin to question you (“How did you get my number?”), and question themselves, retrospect on their own life–”I haven’t done anything important.” But they have and that’s the point of oral histories. They are a part of history.

I am awestruck all over again, every time I think of the phone call I received last night, in return to one of my messages left with a woman’s daughter. She was rightfully questioning of me, but I clearly passed the test, because she became so open and willing and engaging, by the time I hung up with her my jaw was literally hanging open. I sat in shock in the driver’s seat of my car.

This family has an extraordinary part in the history of Chinese adoptions, from a very early point in the larger narrative timeline. Each of their three daughters is from China, adopted in the 1990s. I have researched this process and read books and articles, and I have never heard of a family like this, ever. And they are part of the exact Metro Atlanta community that I so want to document. I absolutely cannot wait to speak with her further, and collect her story (stories, for sure).

There is a huge difference between theorizing and structuring and dreaming up a plan, a project, and executing it–and making the final product effective, interesting, helpful to participants and the larger public. Without knowing who is out there to talk to, I had no idea if this would even work. I now feel that it is not only possible, but it has the potential of being extremely fruitful. The families who have adopted from China are an extraordinarily connected and close-knit community, across the nation. I hope this small project can somehow contribute to those within that cross-national community, and inspire other initiatives. It’s an important international event that deserves to be contemplated in its proper historical context. I’m so excited to bring us a step closer to doing this.

In public history classes, though, it is a simple truth that the regular person goes to museums not to read lots of label text and long passages that, though their stories may be astonishing, do involve more words. No, they most often go to see the things that make history come to life for them. Artifacts, small and large, can often be so powerful, say so much with no words. And this is where my classes are taking me. The emphasis in Material Culture is obvious: the objects, created or altered somehow by man, that offer insight into customs, social patterns, lifestyles, foodways, and larger culture of the people of our past.

So too do I find this in Oral History, the other aforementioned class, where our discussions, readings, and projects revolve around the spoken word, in a historical context, and using a proper methodology that puts it far beyond casual conversation. In conducting oral histories, we are formally and methodically documenting the past, in ways that effect immensely both the narrator (the subject) and the interviewer (me).

On a class tour, we looked at some of the other art exhibits that they have at the airport, to get a feel for their whole program, Airport Art.

I find both of these mediums so powerful. I conducted two oral histories earlier this year, after a one-class-period crash course in one of my other classes, and while they were on two very different topics, I discovered the many nuances that oral historians have been raving about since the 1960s; one of the most significant to me was the unexpected paths the interview can take, and also the candidness of my narrators. By asking very simple questions and then shutting my damn mouth, it was astonishing what stories they would tell me, without my ever having to ask them something provocative or controversial. Not that the primary goal is provocative information, not at all. But, for example, I was interviewing a couple in the late forties who have a young daughter they adopted from Guatemala, and there were a lot of delicate and sensitive subjects I wanted to broach with them, like whether or not they would someday tell her about her half-siblings that they knew she had back in Guatemala, or whether they would help her in finding her biological roots, if she ever wanted to know more about them. These were things I didn’t think I would have the guts to ask. But I never needed to: the family was so welcoming and so willing to explore their complicated emotions on those subjects, via other more basic questions I had asked within the larger subject of their family and their relationship to Guatemala right now. I know this won’t always be the case, and this is a topic I am continuing to work with, but it was an extraordinary first dive into the process, and into the revelations of what oral histories are, and what they do for larger historical projects you are producing.

The exhibit currently on display is a series of dresses and women's fashion, all made with recycled materials--trash, essentially.

Museum staffs, and so, museum exhibits, have as their goal the interpretation of the past, in a way that makes people look at their own lives and relate the past to them, to where they live, to those around them. This can be done very well with historical documents, presented in a cohesive manner, that tell a wonderful story. But, as soon as you add the human voice, and the objects created by men and women in that same story, you have brought the exhibit to life. You have succeeded in a more successful, effective way, in relating the story to your audience, and they will leave remembering it more clearly, and hopefully in a way that connects them to the past, to its utter humanity and enormity.

Henry Glassie, in his book Material Culture, describes our relationship to things in our everyday life, and inspires us to think about them in more significant ways, as pieces that connect us to the larger humanity of the world. After all, if it as not us personally, someone created every single thing in our lives. That is a powerful thought. I leave you with the passion of his words, so inspiring and clearly telling, as he has spent his life studying the Things of People.

Among the new things, the most important, I believe, is the collection: the assembly of gifts, souvenirs, and commodities into a home–the domestic environment in contradistinction to the house. The collection represents a victory over disorder in industrial times, when the flood of goods threatens to sweep us to madness in a rising tide of irrelevant trash, just as the house of stone represented a victory over disorder in the days when people lived close to nature, when the lean wolves came down from the heath and the night winds wailed. But we should not be confused. Today, while we create things out of things made by other people, all across the globe, people in no way less real or alive are going up into the woods and down to the riverside. They are chopping out chunks of nature and fashioning artifacts that display their spirit and serve the serious needs of their neighbors.

Art commissioned by UGA on animals, big and small. I'm very excited about the exhibit we are doing for them.

Material culture historian Henry Glassie reflects on the value of the world as an inspiration for art, and how artistry, at its core, comes from age-old trades. He takes us through the lifespan of a traditionally-made Turkish rug to illustrate this, and brings us back around to the very fact that he is writing about it, to ensure we understand that all manner of artistry, big and small, is a product of the creative soul of humankind.

The chapter I read today was a joyous revelation, a celebration, of the material as historical, as everything we can and hope to be, in what we create on this earth, with our hands, our patience, our inspiration, our minds.

My current quilt project, which has been such a creative thrill thus far.