names

This morning I watched the sun coming up over the Cascades, casting pink and golden light down the hills and across the valley. The light streamed in to my house, and I closed my eyes.

A few days ago one of my long-lost cousins tracked me down. I haven't seen her since she lived in my house briefly in the early eighties, when I was desperately ill. We didn't get along, in point of fact I was mean and my first inclination was to apologize and maintain a polite distance. But she, remarkably, has finished law school, changed her name, found a life outside the family -- and in growing up and away, she has started to ask the hard questions about our secrets.

Our cultural heritage is diaspora, poverty. We all know some of the story, but nobody knows the truth. The whispers of babies given away, of children taken by the state, of bodies washing ashore, of cross-country flights, of criminal predilections, were deemed dangerous by our strong and eccentric matriarchs. They burned documents and pictures. They maintained silence, refused to talk about where they were from, or if they talked, the stories do not tally with known facts. They would not even let us know our last name.

My generation of the family is a classic immigrant success story, if you look at the basic facts; two of us with graduate degrees, the others with reasonably good jobs, no major problems, settled, some of us raising children. We are the summation of the debt, the reason the facts were hidden, the citizens of a democratic nation. Our great-grandmother lived in fear of deportation to a country where people starved. If she were here today and I asked her to tell the story of our family, she would most likely throw up her hands in exasperation and tell me to watch where I'm going, not where I've been.

But she is dead now. They are all dead. The threat of retribution is nonexistent. And I want to know where I came from. I want to know if I have living relatives elsewhere in the world. I want to know if my genetic disorder is a family characteristic.

I want to know my name.

Posted by Bee at December 12, 2002 09:13 AM