Nancy's footprints the day she was born...I was remembering the day my daughter was born, and the day son David was born... and I remembered an assignment I gave to my students at Gompers Secondary School more than ten years ago. A beautiful senior girl who had been born in Laos and had come to the U.S. as a refugee dutifuly did all of the assignments I gave the class. One of assignments involved writing a brief family history. I taught my students to do formal interviews, and I asked them to interview their parents and other relatives to learn the family history. One girl learned something about her parents, her culture, and about the tenuousness of life. I was stunned by her story and had to reconsider making the assignment in a community of refugees.
Who Are These People, and What Are They Doing in my Dream?
With him sitting silent, shoulders drooped,
Mufanwe learned the story one quiet evening
eighteen years after her father and mother
waded into the muddy water toward a little boat.
Her father had paid all the money they had.
The Mekong River is wide there by Viang Chan
across from Hat Don Chan and highway 211...
the distance between sure death and freedom
for a man who had chosen the wrong side in war...
She had been a tiny baby then not worth much.
Her mother talking quietly said her father decided
just before they stepped into the grassy shallows
that she should carry the baby loosely in the water
and perhaps could just let her go into the current...
because she was only a girl, only a girl, only a girl.
David's footprint the day he was born.
3 comments:
Even if a true story I can't imagine Mufanwe's parents telling her of how little value she had as a tiny baby girl--how very sad.
As always, thought provoking. Damn, how lucky my family and I are.
Jen,
The story is true... and if you could know the young woman and the cultural setting in which the family even to this day exist, you would see that they and she see the story as an example of love transcending culture. She understood even as an eighteen-year-old that her father at that critical moment was thinking of the impossibility of what they were doing as a family and how difficult life was going to be. He had absolutely no vision of America and a life here. He doubted even that they might ever see the other side of the river. I feel tremendous sadness for the father... looking back..., acculturated as he must have become in American ways.
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