How My Family Was Touched by History

How My Family Has Been Touched by History—Preliminary Report  2012

for an assignment for ESL 150 Spring 2012

            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.

            Just a week ago, I got something my mother wrote in 1964, when she went back to college to finish getting the degree she stopped working towards in the 1940s, when she married my dad.  In fact, it was history--World War II-- that prompted them to get married.  My father was sure he was going to be killed in the war, so he wanted to leave behind a child to remember him by.  (He made it back, and they had five children together.)

            My parents 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., though he spent a year at Tulane University in Louisiana, where he also worked as a reporter.  Unfortunately for his career in journalism, he slept through the assassination of Huey Long, a famous Louisiana politician, so he left the newspaper business and came to California to get his PhD at UCLA, where my mother was a freshman.  They had the same political beliefs, and one of their concerns was 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 basic rights are being taken away from some Americans just because they’re Muslims and therefore “suspect.” 

            The other way that history touched my family was in the Civil Rights movement.  We were living in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, and 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. 

            Our return to California from the South was also due to history.  In 1964 as part of the War on Poverty, the Job Corps was created, and my father was one of the directors of the Job Corps in Pleasanton, California.  Now there’s a Job Corps program on Treasure Island and some ESL students participate.  Every time students bring me a form to sign from the Job Corps I think about this. 

            Another historical event that definitely affected me was the creation of the United States Peace Corps fifty years ago.  It made it possible for me to train in Hawaii and live on a South Pacific island, Tonga, for two years! 

            My parents were also critical of what the United States was doing in Vietnam, so they spoke out against that, and we participated in marches together.  By coincidence, my mother and I both appear in newspaper pictures of marches—most recently in 2008, when we were at a peace demonstration to end the war against Iraq and in the 1980s, when we were protesting against the US intervention in Central America and against nuclear weapons.  I know that bit of history affected my son, too, because when he was still in his crib thirty years ago, I heard him chanting, “Two, four, six, eight.  We don’t want to radiate.”

            Just as history motivated my parents to get married, history also led to their divorce.  When the Feminist movement began in the late 1960s, my mother finally found the support she needed to end a marriage that really hadn’t been a very happy one even though it had lasted for twenty-five years.  I loved and admired both of my parents, but I loved them more when they were separated.  I’d always had a close relationship with my mother, but my father, like me, was a difficult person to live with.  After my parents’ divorce, my father and I became much closer, and I’m glad I had those years to really appreciate him.  My mother set up a home with a female companion, and they had almost forty years together—most of them very happy, but unfortunately Alzheimer’s was part of my mother’s personal history in her last years.  Maybe someone will make history by finding a cure for that terrible disease.  But when my mother was losing her short term memory, there’s a bit of history she repeated many, many times. 

            “I was watching a documentary on terrible, sadistic prisoner abuse, and I thought it was the Iraqis who were committing these crimes, but it turned out to be the American soldiers who were torturing the Iraqi prisoners!”  She was referring to the atrocities committed by the US military at Abu Ghraib, part of the latest chapter in the history that has touched our nation and our family.