My own family’s story is also one of war, tragedy, and love. Because I was so immersed in Art Spiegelman’s account of his father’s struggles during the Holocaust, I didn’t realize that I could relate to Spiegelman. The realization dawned on me in Maus II, when he described the his father’s experiences in the camps. The treatment, the hard labor, the desire for survival in a place known only for death and suffering, and especially the image of burning mice on page 39, made me think of my own father’s experiences in the concentration camps during the Vietnam War.
The first time I asked my dad about his journey from the depths of the Vietnam War to America was in seventh grade, when we were asked to map out family immigration paths. He told me he and a few friends tried to leave Vietnam by boat. After Saigon fell, everyone rushed to escape, jumping on boats leaving the docks, packing themselves like sardines just to get away. Not everyone made it out. My dad and his friends were led by someone claiming that a boat leaving the dock offered to take natives with them. Instead, my dad and many others entered concentration camps. After this, my dad couldn’t go on, only saying that there was much brainwashing, hard labor cultivating the rice fields, and few survivors of the harshness of the camps. As a thirteen-year-old, I couldn’t fathom the pain in my father’s eyes as he silently relived the horrors of that period, being too shocked to see the tears welling in his eyes. And in many ways, I still can’t imagine what life was like in those camps, because as Maus illustrates so profoundly, it is different for every individual. You can get same broad themes, but you can never really get the same story twice.
And like Vladek Spiegelman – but in a much lesser degree – I noticed signs of how the War and the camps affected my dad. Whenever we stayed overnight at my grandparent’s house and there weren’t enough beds, my dad would sleep on the floor in the room, sometimes without a pillow or a blanket, instead of on the couch in the living room, offhandedly saying that this was nothing compared to what he had to go through. It was things like that, that made me extremely curious, but I stopped pushing the subject, scared of provoking unwanted memories and emotions.
So for that seventh-grade project, I instead mapped out my mom’s story (in contrast to Art), and it is through this story that provoked my overflowing respect for my parents for the strength they exhibited despite all that they have been through, and gratitude for them in their efforts to ensure that I won’t have to experience the hardships they did. My mom, being the oldest, began working to support her family when she was thirteen. This was 1975. She stayed for several years to care for her family before escaping with her brother to Malaysia. They survived fifteen days at sea without food or water before reaching land. My mom and uncle then stayed for several months in the Philippines before being sponsored to Santa Barbara, CA. I only found out later that my grandfather actually worked for the U.S. government at that time, and was offered the chance to relocate his family to America way before 1975. But, wanting to relocate his entire extended family, my grandfather was forced to wait for sufficient accommodations until… it became too late. I learned from my mom later that by the time my grandparents arrived in America in 1991, my grandfather’s health was already failing, due to the extreme guilt he felt for wanting so much that he ended up having nothing at all. He passed away when I was eight. Looking back, after taking this class and reading Maus, I think one of the hardest things for me to accept is that I was too young, too naïve, and in some ways too scared (my grandfather was very intimidating) to ask the questions I wanted to ask about his past. I only hope one day I can make up for it by learning my dad’s story. About a year ago, my dad told me that someday he too hopes he can tell me what happened in the nine years he was in the camps.
But interwoven into this tragic was story is also the story of how my parents got together. They had met briefly in Vietnam before going their separate ways and only met again after my mom came to San Jose and couldn’t contact any of her friends. My aunt told me that if my dad hadn’t forgotten something on the way to work and had to come back for it, he would have missed my mom’s phone call that morning. The rest is history.
After thinking over my parent’s history and looking at how Spiegelman told his, I think I would probably tell their story in textual form, accompanied by the pictures that my parents still have. It is the most comfortable medium for me, and I believe I can do a better job in conveying their stories this way. At most, I would consider a scrapbook-style storytelling. However, with my parents’ particular stories, I think it would be best told in their own words and I would prefer transcribing their words onto paper because I believe the way they tell their story would better capture the feelings of their experiences better than I ever can in my own words.
No comments:
Post a Comment