Thursday, February 2, 2012

How My Family Was Touched by History

Here I've done an assignment my students are asked to do:

How My Family Has Been Touched by History—Preliminary Report  2003

            I used to be really disappointed that my parents weren’t immigrants.  It seemed so boring that everybody in the family spoke only English and weren’t from anywhere interesting.  But I later realized that even my family was touched by history.
            I can’t interview my dad now.  He died in 1999.  However, my mother is still alive, and at the age of 83, her long-term memory is better than her short-term memory. 
So yesterday I spoke to her about our upcoming reports, and she reminded me of some of the things I’d heard about before.
            She and my father grew up during the Depression, when everyone learned to ration, to value everything they had.  That made my father really frugal.  It filled my mother with guilt anytime she bought anything even though she never bought anything really expensive.  My father was from the South of the United States—South Carolina, where he was born and where he died.  He was “touched” by the conservatism and racism in the South—but in a way that made him want to rebel against it.  Many people in the South never leave, so there’s a lot of in-breeding, but my dad left after he graduated from the University of S.C., and he came to California to get his PhD at UCLA, where my mother was a freshman.  Mother says he was “touched” by World War II in a couple of ways.  He spent a long time in graduate school, but when WWII broke out, he knew he would have to complete his studies, so he finally wrote his dissertation.   Also he was sure he was going to get killed, so he wanted to become a father right away, and he did, in 1943.  Of course, WWII took him away from the family, but before he left, he and my mother had been touched by another event:  The internment of Japanese-Americans.  Both of my parents were shocked that citizens of the United States lost their homes and their businesses just because the United States was at war with the country their ancestors came from.  It seemed a terrible injustice to them then—just as today we’re all so upset about Muslims and Arabs been locked up just because they’re Muslims and Arabs and therefore “suspect.”  Mother says they used to take them special things to eat just to show their support for them and to let them know that they disagreed with the US government’s order to put them in camps. 
            The other way that history touched my family was in the Civil Rights movement.  Even though we were living in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, my parents spoke out  against a lot of the practices, like the separation of blacks and whites.  At my father’s memorial service, a black psychologist said that my father was really the person who integrated the University of South Carolina.  In those days there were separate schools, separate water fountains, separate lunch counters, and separate places to sit on the bus.   In the 1960s my dad taught a couple of postgraduate classes in psychology, and at that time there was a separate hospital for the blacks, but there weren’t any trained black psychologists.  My father created a special program for them at the University of South Carolina, so even though they didn’t go to campus in the usual way because there were laws against that, they met with my father and his white graduate students and got their degrees. 
            I’m sure there are other ways that my family has been touched by history, but these are the ways that I’m most aware of after talking to my mother. Of course, this wasn’t the first time that I heard about these events, but it’s the first time I tried to write them down for a preliminary report on “How My Family Has Been Touched by History.”

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